100 BRITISH BIRDS. WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 
they are easily to be shot, and the nest, placed upon the ground, can be discovered 
without difficulty. One marshman boasted that his gun had accounted for eight 
in one season. The males, known to the natives of the Broads as the Blue Jacket, 
arrived about a fortnight before the females, at the end of April or beginning of 
May, and might have been seen in old days beating over the fens with a buoyant 
tern-like flight, seeking their prey which comprised snakes, lizards, large insects, 
such as dragon-flies, mice, frogs, young birds, and birds’ eggs, and occasionally 
young rabbits and leverets. The cry of this Harrier is stated to resemble the 
scream of the Kittiwake. The nest is smaller than that of the Hen-Harrier, is 
composed of stalks of plants, a few sticks, and grass, and is lined with fine grass. 
It has been found in a clover-field, or among furze, and in the fens; Emerson, 
in his account of the Birds of the Norfolk Broad-land, writes :—‘‘If the marsh be 
moist, the flat nest, smaller than a Marsh-Harrier’s, is raised from seven to fifteen 
inches from the marsh bottom; on the other hand, if the marsh be dry, the nest 
does not rise much above the ground. And the materials vary according to the 
marsh crops growing alongside—-old sallow sticks, grass, soft rushes, sedge, and 
occasionally a few of their own feathers being the chief stuffs employed. And 
directly the first egg is laid on the reedy boat—floating as it were on the green 
sea—the hen begins to sit, and closely she sits, never leaving the nest for long. 
Indeed, many fenmen have nearly caught her with their hands whilst sitting, so 
devoted is she to her four bluish-white eggs.” 
“In early spring, perhaps some fine morning you will not see a cock 
Montagu in the sky, when suddenly a brown hen flies with her heavier 
beat in from the sea, and then the blue air resounds with a far-reaching 
Kittiwake-like shriek. The *shaling cock has seen her, and flies down like light- 
ning to court her, and perhaps to fight another cock, who has been waiting for the 
hens as well as he, for there are generally more cocks come over than hens; and 
they fight fiercely, as the fenmen bear testimony, though I have never seen one 
of these love-combats, but fenmen tell me they have often seen them fighting and 
shrieking in the air at the pairing season.” 
The writer possesses examples of Montagu’s Harrier from Kent, Cornwall, 
and Dorsetshire, and has himself seen the birds at large on Exmoor in the early 
summer. In North Devon young birds in the dark red plumage used to be far 
from uncommon in August and September around Barnstaple, and were not un- 
frequently shot and brought to the bird-stuffer in that town. A brood of three 
young birds in white down was taken from a nest just outside Poole, in Dorset- 
shire, in the summer of 1892; these the writer has, together with the cock bird, 
* Query—soaring. 
