I04 British Birds, with their Nests and Eggs. 



Very anxious to possess tliis beautiful bird as a pet he offered a laigh price for 

 it — Buzzards are easil}' tamed, and become very docile in captivity — but it was 

 not to be sold, and some time later he saw it mounted, a sad caricature of what 

 it was when he had seen it last. 



The Buzzard nests at the end of March, or in April or May ; the nest is 

 composed of sticks, lined with leaves and grass, and is usually placed upon the 

 ledge of a cliff, but in Avooded districts on a tree, where built in a fork it is a 

 large structure. Seebohm states that in the forests of Central Germany, where it 

 is the most abundant of all the Falconidcc, the nests are generally placed in beech 

 and oak trees, ; they measure from one and a half to two feet in diameter, and, 

 if in a fork of the tree, are nearly' as high. The foundation is of large twigs, 

 finished at the top with slender twigs. The nest is very flat, the hollow in the 

 middle containing the eggs being about the size and depth of a soup-plate. The 

 final lining is fresh green leaves, generally beech, but, in one nest, although it 

 was in a beech tree, the lining was of green larch twigs. This lining is probably 

 often renewed. Many of the nests examined by Seebohm contained field-mice 

 that had been brought by the old birds to the young ; remains of birds were 

 never noted. The nests were high up, always from fifty to ninety feet above the 

 ground, and the birds returned to the same nest year after year. When the 

 sitting bird is on the nest she sits head to wind, and flies off head to wind, 

 wheeling round overhead with a melancholy cry. The Buzzard is said to 

 breed in its first spring in immature plumage. This may be the riile 

 with all the Buzzards : the Honey-Buzzard, a very aberrant type certainly, nests 

 before it has attained its full dress. In the great forests in Scotland the Buzzard 

 usually nests in some tall fir. A nest very neatly constructed of sticks the writer 

 looked into on a cliff on Ramsey Island was closely lined with fine grass ; another 

 he examined in a small cave on the North Devon coast was placed upon a ledge, 

 and was very roughly built of stalks and grass. When turning the corner of a 

 cliff in North Somerset, the writer one da}^ came close upon a Raven that at his 

 approach dropped an ^^^ it had in its bill ; it proved a fresh and well marked 

 Buzzard's ^gZ- Sometimes the nests of the Buzzard are lined with the Eagles' 

 favourite grass, varieties of Luzula. The number of eggs varies from two to four, 

 three being the usual number in a clutch. They differ greatly in size, shape, and 

 colour of their markings, being oval, elongate, and more rarely elliptical. In size 

 they measure from two and a quarter to two inches; in length, by from i'9 to 

 I "65 inches in breadth. In the writer's cabinet the Welsh eggs of the Buzzard 

 are larger than some received from Germany, but are less richly marked. (The 

 ^%% No. 303, in Plate ix, is from one taken on Ramsey Island). Their ground 



