Birps OF PReEy. 177 
an addition, indeed, to the landscape; and the hosts 
of song-birds that seek cover when other hawks come 
in sight pay not the slightest attention to this one. 
Brief extracts from Wilson sum up the life-history 
of this bird: 
“This formidable, vigorous-winged, and well-known bird subsists 
altogether on the finny tribes that swarm in our bays, creeks, and 
rivers, procuring his prey by his own active skill and industry, and 
seeming no further dependent on the land than as a mere resting- 
place, or, in the usual season, a spot of deposit for his nest, eggs, and 
young... . 
“The Fish-hawk is migratory, arriving on the coasts of New York 
and New Jersey about the twenty-first of March, and retiring to the 
south about the twenty-second of September. Heavy equinoctial 
storms may vary these periods of arrival and departure a few days, 
but long observation has ascertained that they are kept with remark- 
able regularity... . 
“The first appearance of the Fish-hawk in spring is welcomed by 
the fishermen, as a happy signal of the approach of those vast shoals 
of herring, shad, etc., etc., that regularly arrive on our coasts and 
enter our rivers in such prodigious multitudes. . . . 
“The nest of the Fish-hawk is usually built on the top of a dead 
or decaying tree, sometimes not more than fifteen, often upward of 
fifty, feet from the ground.” 
The nest, of late years, has been found occasionally 
placed directly upon the ground. 
We now come to a strongly-marked family of 
birds that have always attracted much attention to 
themselves, principally because their active day is 
our night. It is not true of these birds—the owls— 
that they can only see when we cannot, and that they 
are only active when the day is done. There are 
some that are diurnal, and the others are more 
strictly crepuscular than nocturnal. An owl is by 
no means helpless if driven from his retreat at noon- 
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