NIGHT AND DAY HUNTERS 189 



annual repairs. While the two or three large, rough, dull- 

 white eggs are being incubated by both mates, and espe- 

 cially after the young appear, these eagles, unlike the golden 

 species, become truly magnificent in the fierce defence of 

 their treasures; yet a rooster is easily a match for the 

 cowardly eagle at other times. Immense quantities of 

 food must be carried to the helpless young for the three or 

 four months while they remain in the nest, and for weeks 

 after they learn to fly. Immature birds reverse nature's 

 order and are larger than adults, and their plumage under- 

 goes three changes before they appear at the dose of the 

 third year in white heads and tails. They may live a 

 century. In whatever phase of plumage, one may know 

 our national bird by its unfeathered legs. It is safe to say 

 any eagle seen in the eastern United States is the bald- 

 head, which name, of course, does not indicate that the 

 bird is actually bald like the vultures, but simply hooded 

 with white feathers. 



In the mountainous regions of the western United 

 States, it is the dark, feathered-legged golden eagle with a 

 yellow nape that has furnished the Indians with quiUs for 

 their warbonnets and much folk lore. And it is of the 

 European golden eagle that Tennyson wrote the lines set 

 to wonderfully descriptive music by McDowell, but 

 equally applicable to our own great bird : 



"He clasps the crag with hooked hands; 

 Close to the sun, in lonely lands. 

 Ringed with the azure world he stands. 

 The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls: 

 He watches from his motmtain walls. 

 And like a thunderbolt he falls." j 



