I "squeaked up" the Marsh Hawk seen this morning 
bringing it within short gun range although I was well 
back from the meadow among some dense young oaks. 
Just after breakfast I spent nearly half-an-hour 
watching two Gray Squirrels which wee building a nest 
in a tall, slender white pine fully sixty feet above the 
ground. The tree is one of a group of a dozen or more 
standing on the north slope of Ball’s Hill. The Squirrels 
were working very hard and steadily collecting oak twigs 
with bunches of leaves attached. In order to get these, 
they ran down the pine quite to the ground and thence 
rambled off into the woods beyond my range of sight, 
always returning within two or three minutes, however. 
In no instance did either of them attempt to bring more 
than one twig at a time and even this burden seemed to 
embarrass their movements greatly, especially when, as was 
often the case, they climbed one of the other pines and 
crossed to the nest by leaping from branch to branch. It 
was surprising to see the boldness with which they sprang 
from the tip of a slender and often dead and brittle 
branch to the extremity of another over a gap of three or 
four feet in width and at a height of fifty or sixty feet. 
I was just saying to myself that their judgment in matters 
of this kind must be infallible when a startling catastrophe 
occurred. Both animals had met at the nest and had just 
