Our Birds of Prey. 
By the Editor, 
HOUGH the title strictly includes the vulturine 
and strigine birds, it is intended in this present 
paper to deal only with the falconine group. 
Until the publication of Schomburgk's "Reisen in Bri- 
tisch Guiana/'in which a list of32 hawks, identified by Pro- 
fessor CABAN1S was given, little or nothing was known of 
the different species of these birds ; and since then but a 
slight extension of our knowledge in this direction has 
been made by Salvin's " Revised List of the Birds of 
British Guiana" {Ibis 1884, etc.), based chiefly on the 
results of the repeated collections made by Mr. Henry 
WHITELEY, who, however, has never collected along the 
coast. The list given by SCHOMBURGK was extended to 35 
species by SALVIN ; while in the present communication, 
I have to record the occurrence of 43 species, thus adding 
8 new forms, not mentioned in Salvin's revised list, to 
this group of our fauna. 
It is curious that, in spite of the fact that a very con- 
siderable number of books dealing with many of the 
features of the Natural History of the colony have been 
published, so little attention has been given to this pre- 
dominant form of bird life. True Dr. DALTON, in his 
History of British Guiana, has made somewhat more than 
brief popular reference to many of the species of our 
hawks, but his descriptions suffer from the drawbacks 
that they are neither sufficiently accurate nor diagnostic — 
so that in the generality of cases, it is out of the question 
to be certain of the exact species referred to. 
