166 
THE BIRDS OF HAMPSHIRE. 
(1862), gives the following complete description of this 
species : 
" The honey buzzard, however {Falco apivoms), comes 
regularly over from Germany about the end of May, 
attracted in some measure, perhaps, by its favourite food, 
the larvae of wasps and bees, but chiefly by the wide range 
of the woods. At Mark Ash and Puckpits I have 
frequently, for an hour together, watched a couple, sailing 
with their wings outspread, allowing the wind, on a 
boisterous day, to catch them, till it almost veered them 
over, just circling round the tops of the beeches, sometimes 
even * tumbling,' like a pigeon, and answering each other 
with their sharp short cry, prolonged every now and then 
into a melancholy wail. Its favourite breeding stations 
are amongst the tall beech-woods round Lyndhurst, in 
Mark Ash and Gibbs' Hill, Puckpits, Coalmeer, Prior's 
Acre, and the oaks of Bentley and Sloden. The nest 
is always placed in the old one of a crow, or even the 
common buzzard, whose young by that time have flown, 
and sometimes made on the top of a squirrel's ' cage,' 
the birds contenting themselves with only re-shaping it, 
and lining the inside with fresh green leaves. The fact of 
a squirrel's ' cage ' being used, will account for the nest 
being sometimes found so low, and on a comparatively 
small tree. No rule can therefore be laid down as to 
its position. I have known this bird build in very different 
situations. Mr. Rake found its nest at Sloden, on the 
forked bough of a low oak, not thirty feet from the ground. 
In i860, a pair built, not very much higher, in the over- 
hanging branch of a beech in Puckpit ; and, in the same 
year, another pair reared their young on the top of a fir in 
Holmy Ridge Hill. And in 1861 and 1862, I knew of two 
nests not fifty yards apart, in Mark Ash, each placed 
