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There are mighty few birds that fly a mile a minute, Mr. Lincoln says, 

 although when scared and flying with the throttle wide-open as it were, many 

 step up their speed considerably above the normal rate. 



For instance, Mr, Lincoln has the record of a European vulture pursued 

 in an airplane that flew 110 miles an hour for a considerable distance. How- 

 ever, the swifts are probably the swiftest of birds. In Mesopotamia a swift 

 was observed literally to fly rings around an airplane moving at a speed of 80 

 miles an hour. 



Mr. Lincoln says from his observation of the cloud swift of the T7est 

 Indies and Central America, a swift as big as our sparrow-hawk, he can readily 

 believe that its normal flight must be close to 100 miles an hour. 



However, among the larger birds of this country, Mr. Lincoln saves his 

 highest admiration for the duck hawk. Nothing in feathers, in this country can 

 beat a duck-hawk. A duck hawk has such flight superiority that it can fly down 

 the fastest, most frightened duck with little or no trouble. 



And when a duck hawk is in sight, majoy other birds refuse to take the 

 air. !7hen the duck hawk swoops, the avocet, for instance, crouches on the 

 ground rather than try to escape by flight. 



The duck hawk, Mr. Lincoln tells me, is the American representative of 

 the king of falcons, the famous Peregrine falcon, which in the Middle Ages was 

 the falcon of kings. In fact, he says that it takes an expert to tell the 

 Americeji duck hawk from its more celebrated European cousin. In days of old, 

 when falconry was in vogue, these hawks were used not only for bringing down 

 game, but also in war for intercepting messages sent by carrier pigeon. 



Of course, when we mention big birds, v:e naturally think of the eagle. 

 But an eagle is not particularly fast as a flyer, accept when it zooms down to 

 catch its prey. The eagle is a soaring bird. 'Thile duck-hawks may be compp,red 

 to the pursuit planes of run aerial fleet, the eagles and buzz/;.rdr represent the 

 gliders. In fact, they frequently operate on the same principle as the glider; 

 that is, by taking advantage of the rising currents of air and riding on them. 



Getting back to the subject of speed in flying however, Mr. Lincoln 

 points out that not only have our ideas of the speed of individ-ual birds been 

 revised by accurate timing, but the older notions of mass migrations of birds 

 have also undergone change. 



Many early naturalists held that bird migration took place at a much 

 faster rate th-an we now know to be the case. For instance, until comparatively 

 recently, it was frequently believed that some birds flew from Africa to 

 northern Europe and from Canada to South America in one swift overnight flight. 



From bird banding, and other evidence, we now know, however, that most 

 bird migration is/^ather leisurely affair. Tlie birds as a rule move from place 

 to place in short hops rather than in one long non-stop flight. T7arblcrs and 

 thrushes, for instance, travel about 20 miles an hour. But oven at that in 

 flights of eight or nine hours at a time, it doesn't talce many days for them 

 to pass from their winter range to their summer home. As they find things to 

 their liking they may linger on the way. 



