The Western Red-tailed Hawk 



and have burnt his gopher-fields with fire. Worst 

 of all, these ruthless invaders, having no use them- 

 selves for sage-rats, yet deny them to their rightful 

 owner, the Redtail; and they pursue him fiercely 

 with engines of destruction when he ventures to 

 sample an imported Danish fowl. Verily, these be 

 troublous times for the aristocracy. Alackaday ! 



Truth to tell, there is no more foolish obsession 

 which afflicts farmer folk than this, — that all Hawks 

 should be killed at sight; unless it be this other, — 

 that all birds caught eating cherries are worthy of 

 death. Penny wise, pound foolish, both of them! 

 The man who is worst injured by this folly is, of 

 course, the farmer himself, but society also suffers 

 through him. Why, it is as if the man should send 

 a charge of buckshot through a boy who stooped 

 to pluck a strawberry — the while he cared nothing 

 that the cattle were ravaging his wheatfield for lack 

 of that same small boy to drive them out. In all 

 seriousness, it is no exaggeration to say that, insofar 

 as the three most easily slaughtered species of 

 Hawks are concerned, the Marsh Hawk, Swainson's 

 and the Redtail, any farmer in the grain-growing 

 sections of this State could well afford to raise a 

 hundred chickens annually and feed them to the 

 birds, if by so doing he could secure immunity from 

 the ravages of rodent pests. Yes; the excess of 

 wheat and barley which the pests destroy annually 

 in root and in blade would feed the chicks and 

 repay the trouble tenfold. 



The Western Redtail is still, after the American 

 Kestrel (Cerchneis sparverius) , the commonest hawk 

 in California. It possesses great adaptability, so 

 that it is able to maintain itself as well upon the 

 Colorado and Mojave deserts as upon the middle slopes of the Sierras 

 and the jutting cliffs of the boundless chaparral country. It retires 

 irregularly from the more elevated valleys under stress of winter, but in 

 late summer it rises to the very limit of trees. Only this season (1922), 

 and in early July, we saw one over our camp in the Grand Cirque (alt. 

 11,000), where we were hunting for Leucostictes' nests. 



By nature this handsome bird is little afraid of man. Young birds, 

 though capable of sustained flight, refuse to believe ill of their human 



167J 





Taken in Arizona Photo by the Author 



OBSERVATION 



WESTERN REDTAIL, ADULT, ON SAHUARO 



