46 SEA EAGLE. 



add anything further on the subject, as the reasoning of Wilson is 

 conclusive. 



Our author describes an Eagle's nest, which he visited, in company 

 ■with the writer of this article, on the eighteenth of May, 1812. It was 

 then empty ; but from every appearance a brood had been hatched and 

 reared in it that season. The following year, on the first day of 

 March, a friend of ours took from the same nest three eggs, the largest 

 of which measured three inches and a quarter in length, two and a 

 quarter in diameter, upwards of seven in circumference, and weighed 

 four ounces five drams, apothecaries weight ; the color a dirty yellowish 

 white — one was of a very pale bluish white ; the young were perfectly 

 formed. Such was the solicitude of the female to preserve her eggs, that 

 she did not abandon the nest, until several blows, with an axe, had been 

 given the tree. 



In the history of Lewis and Clark's Expedition, we find the following 

 account of an Eagle's nest, which must have added not a little to the 

 picturesque effect of the magnificent scenery at the Falls of the Mis- 

 souri : , 



" Just below the upper pitch is a little island in the middle of the 

 river, well covered with timber. Here on a cottonwood tree an Eagle 

 had fixed its nest, and seemed the undisputed mistress of a spot, to 

 contest whose dominion neither man nor beast would venture' across the 

 gulfs that surround it, and which is further secured by the mist rising 

 from the falls."* 



The Bald Eagle was observed, by Lewis and Clark, during their whole 

 route to the Pacific Ocean. 



It may gratify some of our readers to be informed, that the opinion 

 of Temminck coincides with ours respecting the identity of our Bald 

 and Sea Eagles ; but he states that the Falco ossifragus of Gmelin, 

 the Sea Eagle of Latham, is the young of the Falco albicilla, which in 

 its first year so much resembles the yearling of the leucoeephalus, that 

 it is very difficult to distinguish them. — I^ote by Mr. Ord. 



* Hist, of the Exped. vol. i., p. 264. 



