Mr. J. H. Gurney on a New Species of Hawk from China. 447 
upon it here, but simply make a few observations upon the nest 
and eggs, as I see Mr. Gould has had no opportunity of doing 
so, not having been able to procure the eggs. Although I have 
myself frequently found the nests of these birds, yet the diffi¬ 
culty of getting at them has made the eggs comparatively rare 
in collections. The nests are easily found; for, indeed, they are 
large and conspicuous. They are often three feet high, and con¬ 
sist of a mass of sticks piled up between the forks of the top¬ 
most branches of the larger Eucalypti , or placed at the end of a 
leaning bough. The lower part of the nest is made of thick 
sticks, smaller ones being used for the top, and the whole lined 
with twigs and grass. The first eggs I saw were taken in August 
1860, and were given to me by Mr. James Ramsay, at Carding- 
ton, a station on the Bell River, near Molong. They were taken 
from a nest which Mr. Ramsay had found, by a black boy who 
stepped the tree. The nest, he states, was placed upon a fork 
near the end of one of the main branches of a large box-tree 
(.Eucalyptus , sp. ?). It was fully seventy feet from the ground, 
and no easy task to get at it. This nest was about 3 J feet high, 
by 4 or 5 broad, and about IJ foot deep, lined with tufts of 
grass and with down and feathers plucked from the breasts of 
the birds, upon which the eggs were placed. The eggs are two 
in number, nearly round, and very thick and rough in the shell. 
One egg is 3 inches long by 2-| broad, the ground-colour white, 
thickly blotched and minutely freckled with rust-red, light yel¬ 
lowish brown, and obsolete spots of a lilac tint. The other egg 
is nearly all white, having only a few blotches of light yellowish 
brown, and some fine dots of light rust-red; it is 2J inches in 
length by 2f in breadth. 
XXXVII.— On Accipiter stevensoni, a New Species of Hawk 
from China. By J. H. Gurney, M.P., F.Z.S., &c. 
(Plate XI.) 
In introducing to the readers of ‘The Ibis’ a Chinese Sparrow- 
hawk which I believe to have been hitherto undescribed, and in 
now describing this species from specimens in the Norwich 
Museum, I have taken the opportunity of designating it by the 
