GOSHAWK 
with the ragged leafy home of a possum, which a 
little more experience might have led me to diagnose 
without climbing the tree. 
I sat up in the tree-top and looked about me. 
Suddenly my veins tingled as I saw in a white-gum 
close at hand, on a level with my eyes, an unmistak- 
able Hawk's nest, and a new one, too. Down in a 
twinkling, I found myself faced with a stiff scramble 
to the first fork of the big tree, but a dead wattle 
leaned against the trunk overcame that difficulty, 
and I was soon at the nest. As I peered over the 
edge, I saw for the first time, two of them, on a 
loose mat of dry gum-leaves, the handsome eggs of 
the Goshawk, red-stained on a dull white ground. 
I blew them at the foot of the tree, and not all the 
mosquitoes of the forest could spoil the delight of 
that hour. 
A simple and even a cruel pleasure, reader, the 
robbing of a Hawk's nest. That might also be my 
point of view now. But not then, and the twenty- 
fourth of September never passes without evoking a 
picture of the smooth white bole, the big nest, and 
in the high boughs the cadences of the south-easter, 
that " thwart sea-wind full of rain and foam." 
COLLARED SPARROW-HAWK 
Accipiter cirrocephalus cirrocephalus 
I HAVE mentioned the prominent marks of distinction 
between this bird and the Goshawk in dealing with 
