Nest of Circus Hudsonius
1875. Middlesex Co., Mass. [Middlesex County, Massachusetts]
June 5 [June 5, 1875] Clear and very hot with S. [south] wind. Started off
at 8 in my buggy and drove up into
the willows, taking my Tonks br. ldr [breech loader]. Went
directly into my marsh hawk's nest and
when within about 15 yds. [yards] the [female] rose
from the nest and made off screaming
shrilly quee quee quee, until my heavy
charge of No. 6 stopped her. The nest
contained four eggs, all spotless, and but 
one tinged slightly with green. The nest
was placed flat on the ground in a dry
meadow, and at the foot of a small
clump of bushes but not among them.
There was scarcely if any depression in the
centre where the eggs lay and the whole
affair looked slovenly and unkempt: though
the grasses composing the lining if lining
it could be called were perhaps "circularly
arranged", they were not, certainly, "interwoven"
in any way. The exterior was composed of
sticks, many of them large, the interior
wholly of dry grass; no feathers, in fact
nothing else whatsoever. Packing the eggs in
my basket and propping up the dead
[female] in the nest I concealed myself in 
a thicket of bushes within good range
and awaited the return of the male.
In the course of perhaps ten minutes
I heard his kep kep kep overhead and
looking up espied him sailing about at
an immense height, so high indeed
that he looked no larger than a barn swallow.
A crow was whirling about him and a
Buteo lineatus that was sailing apparently
in his company, and the trio soon