40 WINTER NOTES 
first of these, the dreaded Duck Hawk, is frequent along 
the sea border and large open rivers where abound the 
aquatic birds that farm. his chief prey. The celebrated 
White Hawk or Jer-Falcon (Falco candicans Gm.) is 
larger and more powerful even than the Peregrine, but it 
comes to us so rarely from its remote arctic home, as to be 
justly considered but an accidental wanderer. 
Of the hawks, properly so called : namely, the short wing- 
ed and ‘‘ignoble” birds of prey, the majority are migrato- 
ry in the more northern sections of the Union, going “south 
in winter. One, however, the Gos-Hawk (Astur atrica- 
pillus Bon.) is a winter visitor, and subsisting upon rab- 
bits, partridges, jays, and such other birds and poultry as 
fall in his way, is a bird of considerable celebrity for his 
strength and boldness. Formerly his European ally of 
the same name, and with which the earlier ornithologists 
supposed ours to be identical, was held in great esteem in 
hawking, and according to Pennant, was considered of 
unequalled value among the short winged hawks for the 
purposes of falconry. It is, moreover, when mature, of 
beautiful plumage, the white under surface being elegantly 
pencilled transversely with waved ashy-brown lines, and 
with broader longitudinal stripes of a dark ferruginous 
hue. The young are more plainly colored, and differ for 
several years so widely from their parents, as to be hardly 
recognizable as belonging to the same species. I once 
found a wing of this bird, which had been dropped in the 
woods by some bird of prey; the flesh had been torn 
from it, leaving only the bones of the upper and fore 
arm, and the primary quills, showing that even such ty- 
rants of the air are not exempt from enemies more pow- 
erful even than they. Possibly it was the Duck Hawk 
that in this case was the destroyer, since its representa- 
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