204 BIRDS OF DUMFRIESSHIRE 
wiU be future visits, possibly uninterrupted and prolonged, 
till once more we can regard the White-tailed Eagle as a 
resident 
Not having received the protection afforded to the Golden 
Eagle in certain deer-forests, this bird has become more 
and more rare as a British nesting-species ; its eyries on 
the north-west coast of Scotland and Ireland have been 
reduced almost to a vanishing point, and those individuals 
which are now only occasionaUy seen in Great Bntam 
may be said to be stragglers from northern Europe. 
[THE GOSHAWK. Astur palumbarius (Linnaeus). 
Although there are no modern records of the occurrence of 
the Goshawk in the county, the foUowing documentary 
evidence, though not amounting to actual proof ot its 
former existence, is interesting. "When the family of 
Avenel granted the territory of Eskdale to the monks of 
Melrose," writes Professor Cosmo Innes, " they reserved . . . 
the eyries of falcons and tercels. . . . Even the trees m which 
hawks usually buUt, were to be held sacred, and those in 
which they had built one year, were on no account to be 
felled, till it should be found whether they were about to 
build'there the next year or no."* 
Commenting on the above, Robert Gray says : Mone 
of the commoner tree-buUding species, as Kites, Sparrow- 
Hawks, etc., were much valued by the falconer, and it 
seems to me that the birds thus carefully protected must 
have been Goshawks. If so, we have here distinct evidence 
that they bred regularly in the south of Scotland m the 
thirteenth century."t 
» Scodand in Mid. Ages, 1860, pp. 129, 130. 
t Birds of West ScoOand, 1871, p. 38. 
