SWALLOW-TAILED HAWK. 
277 
winter quarters, for several days. They usually feed from 
their claws as they flv along. Their flight is easy and graceful, 
with sometimes occasional sweeps among the trees, the long 
feathers of their tail spread out, and each extremity of it used 
alternately to lower, elevate, or otherwise direct their course. 
I have never yet met with their nests. 
These birds are particularly attached to the extensive 
prairies of the western countries, where their favourite snakes, 
lizards, grasshoppers, and locusts, are in abundance. They 
are sometimes, though rarely, seen in Pennsylvania and New 
Jersey, and that only in warm and very long summers. A 
specimen, now in the Museum of Philadelphia, was shot within 
a few miles of that city. We are informed, that one was 
taken in the South Sea, off the coast which lies between Ylo 
and Arica, in about lat. 23 deg. south, on the eleventh of 
September, by the Reverend the Father Louis Feuillee.* 
They are also common in Mexico, and extend their migrations 
as far as Peru. 
The Swallow-tailed Hawk measures full two feet in length, 
and upwards of four feet six inches in extent ; the bill is 
black ; cere, yellow, covered at the base with bristles ; iris of 
the eye, silvery cream, surrounded with a blood-red ring ; 
whole head and neck, pure white, the shafts, fine black hairs ; 
the whole lower parts also pure white ; the throat and breast, 
shafted in the same manner; upper parts, or back, black, 
glossed with green and purple ; whole lesser coverts, very 
dark purple ; wings long, reaching within two inches of the 
tip of the tail, and black ; tail also very long, and remarkably 
forked, consisting of twelve feathers, all black, glossed with 
green and purple ; several of the tertials, white, or edged with 
white, but generally covered by the scapulars ; inner vanes of 
the secondaries, white on their upper half, black towards their 
points ; lining of the wings, white ; legs, yellow, short, and 
thick, and feathered before half way below the knee ; claws, 
* Jour . des Obs. tom. ii. 88. 
