104 BRITISH BIRDS, WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 
Very anxious to possess this beautiful bird as a pet he offered a high price for 
it—Buzzards are easily 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 wooded districts on a tree, where built im 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 Fulconida, 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 rule 
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 day came close upon a Raven that at his 
approach dropped an egg it had in its bill; it proved a fresh and well marked 
Buzzard’s egg. Sometimes the nests of the Buzzard are lined with the Eagles’ 
favourite grass, varieties of Zusu/a. 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 1’9 to 
1’65 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 
egg No. 303, in Plate ix, is from one taken on Ramsey Island). Their ground 
