46 NESTING HABITS OF E. AFBICAN BIRDS 
backs, white breasts — at one stage of their lives or plumage 
they appear to have black breasts — and broad, red, fan-shaped 
tails, one cannot go about the country for long without seeing 
them. 
In the Mau forest their nests are not difficult to locate. 
Usually near the top of one of our so-called ‘ cedars,’ they 
are easy to see owing to their great size. Needless to say, they 
are by no means easy to reach, as the bark of these trees is 
exceedingly bad holding for climbing-irons, and without irons 
the lower part of the trunk is usually unsurmountable except 
for a monkey or Dorobo. The nest I am going to describe 
was situated near the top of a decaying cedar standing isolated 
in the midst of a small glade. I had known of this nest for 
several months but, owing to the great difficulty of knowing 
at what time of the year to expect to find eggs, I had no guide 
as to when to visit it. However, on August 20 last I happened 
to pass that way and, to my great joy, on tapping the foot of 
the tree an undoubted Augur Buzzard flew from the nest. 
Next day I climbed the tree with the help of irons. The nest 
was about thirty feet up in a fork near the top of the tree, and, 
like many of the ‘ Raptores,’ was so bulky that on getting 
beneath it I had considerable difficulty in getting round and 
above it. However, I managed somehow, and found that 
there were two eggs, very much like the European buzzard’s: 
One egg was well marked at the large end with red smudges 
and spots, with a very few lead-grey markings interspersed ; 
the other had very few markings and was practically dirty- 
white in coloration. The nest was neatly lined with green 
wild olive leaves and small leaf-covered branches of the same 
tree. The body of the nest — and it was very large, being 
about thirty inches in diameter and eighteen inches deep, 
obviously the accumulation of many years — was made of 
rough sticks and boughs, the majority of them long 
since dead. The eggs proved to be in the last stages^ of 
incubation, in fact one was cracked and on the point of 
hatching. 
The old birds were undemonstrative, but one of them had 
returned to the nest before I was a hundred yards away 
from the foot of the tree. 
