60 RED-TAILED HAWK. 
since the decline of falconry, seldom or never domesticated, offer to 
those who wisli eagerly to investigate their history, and to delineate 
their particular character and manners, great and insurmountable diffi- 
culties. Little more can be done in such cases than to identify the 
species, and trace it through the various quarters of the world, where 
it has been certainly met with. 
The Red-tailed Hawk is most frequently seen in the lower parts of 
Pennsylvania, during the severity of winter. Among the extensive 
meadows that border the Schuylkill and Delaware, below Philadelphia, 
where flocks of Larks {Alauda magyia), and where mice and moles are 
in great abundance, many individuals of this Hawk spend the greater 
part of the winter. Others prowl around the plantations, looking out 
for vagrant chickens ; their method of seizing which, is by sweeping 
swiftly over the spot, and grappling them with their talons, bearing 
them away to the woods. The bird from which the figure in the plate 
was draAvn, was surprised in the act of feeding on a hen he had just 
killed, and which he was compelled to abandon. The remains of the 
chicken were immediately baited to a steel-trap, and early the next 
morning the unfortunate Red-tail was found a prisoner, securely fastened 
by the leg. The same hen which the day before he had massacred, was, 
the very next, made the means of decoying him to his destruction ; in 
the eye of the farmer a system of fair and just retribution. 
This species inhabits the whole United States ; and, I believe, is not 
migratory, as I found it in the month of May, as far south as Fort 
Adams, in the Mississippi territory. The young were at that time 
nearly as large as their parents, and were very clamorous, making an 
incessant squealing noise. One, which I shot, contained in its stomach 
mingled fragments of frogs and lizards. 
The Red-tailed Hawk is twenty inches long, and three feet nine 
inches in extent ; bill blue black ; cere and sides of the mouth yellow, 
tinged with green ; lores and spot on the under eyelid white, the former 
marked with fine radiating hairs ; eyebrow, or cartilage, a dull eel skin 
color, prominent, projecting over the eye ; a broad streak of dark 
brown extends from the sides of the mouth backwards ; crown and 
hind-head dark brown, seamed with white and ferruginous ; sides of the 
neck dull ferruginous, streaked with brown ; eye large ; iris pale amber ; 
"back and shoulders deep brown ; wings dusky, barred with blackish ; 
ends of the five first primaries nearly black ; scapulars barred broadly 
with white and brown ; sides of the tail-coverts white, barred with 
ferruginous, middle ones dark, edged with rust ; tail rounded, extending 
two inches beyond the wings, and of a bright red brown, with a single 
band of black near the end, and tipped with brownish white ; on some of 
the lateral feathers are slight indications of the remains of other narrow 
bars ; lower parts brownish white ; the breast ferruginous, streaked 
