| 1878. ]- The Home of the Harpy-Eagle. 153 
From the garden-terrace of £/ Pinal, a little villa on the ridge 
_. of the Organos mountains, I frequently watched a pair of harpies 
that had their nest in the crags below. The hen-bird, which 
could be recognized by her larger size and the greater energy of 
her movements, generally made her appearance a few minutes be- 
fore sunrise, mounted to the upper sky, as if to study the 
meteorological probabilities for the coming day, and then pro- 
ceeded to business. After wheeling at an elevation of some hun- 
dred feet over the tree tops, in a circle or rather in a contracting 
spiral for a couple of minutes, she commonly would stop short, 
hover with quivering wings for a second or two, and then dive 
into the leafy ocean below, with a headlong rapidity that could 
hardly be followed by the eye, but evidently with a practical pur- 
pose, for her descents were generally succeeded by the ascent of 
a cloud of birds or the shrill piping of the squirrel-monkeys 
(Callithrix sciureus) and the exultant scream of the wild huntress 
from the depths of the forest. Then followed a pause, devoted to 
domestic duties, during which the thanksgiving duet of the 
= eaglets ascended from the cliffs, and very soon after one or both 
-~ parents reappeared in the upper air to resume the work of de- 
struction. 
The calłow harpies, with their pendant crops, their misshapen 
big heads and their preposterous claws, resemble embryo demons 
or infantine chimeras rather than any creatures of nature, but 
they grow very rapidly and their appetite during the first six 
months of their existence is almost insatiable. The pair which 
I afterwards sent to Vera Cruz kept an Indian boy busy from 
morning to night, cleaning their cage and refilling their trough 
with a ragout of fish, pork and hominy. The exigencies of two 
or three harpy-nests to the square league, which I take to be the 
average ratio of their distribution would exhaust the food supply 
and the sea-eagle is pursued for miles with implacable fury when- 
er he ventures to prespash upon the rivers of the tierra caliente. 
