A Devoted Mother. 
Some months ago — to be exact June 2, 1910 — 
I saw a sparrowhawk fly from the direction 
of a tree stub, and examined the latter for a 
possible - nest. There was a promising old 
woodpecker hole near its top; but, though I 
shook the stub till it cracked and threatened 
to fall, no sign of life appeared. 
Next day I came with climbing spurs; for, 
though the trunk was but twenty feet high, it 
was some fifteen inches in diameter and offered 
nothing like a branch or knot for the hand to 
grasp. Pounding with the heavy climbing- 
irons shook the stub, but had no other result, 
and I began to ascend. This was decidedly 
shaky business. The inch and a half steel 
spurs sank their full length into the rotten 
wood and then often slid down for a foot at a 
time, beneath my weight, while the stump 
tottered and promised to fall at each slip. I 
feared the eggs — if eggs there were in the 
nest — would be broken by rattling together. 
However, finding a rather sound streak in 
the wood, and repeatedly using one spur in 
this, I soon had my ear at the nest-hole and 
lieard a low peeping within. Enlarging the 
hole with my knife was slow work, for the 
walls were fully two inches thick; the wood, 
though rotten, was spongy, and my spurs 
would not bear much weight. Two or three 
times I climbed up and sat astride the stub 
to rest, each time half expecting the shaky old 
thing to save me the trouble of climbing down. 
At last the hole was large enough to .admit 
my bare arm, while not large enough to ruin 
the nest. Looking in I saw, not the expected 
fledglings, but a full-grown female sparrow- 
hawk sitting composedly at the bottom of the 
cavity. I climbed down to take off my coat, 
then up again; the stub, swaying, tottering and 
creaking as before. Still the old bird had not 
stirred a feather, >for all I could see. She was 
still sitting robin-like, looking up to the en¬ 
trance, her tail against the opposite wall of 
the hollow, the big chips of my cutting half 
covering her back and neck. 
By reaching in my arm to a little above the 
elbow, I could just get my fingers under the 
sitting bird. She was entirely passive as I 
lifted and then drew her toward the entrance. 
She was half through the doorway, and I ob¬ 
served her beautiful head, open bill and eyes 
fixed on mine, when, of her own accord, she 
drew back into the nest, where she sat brood¬ 
ing just as I had found her. Again I lifted 
her out, this time entirely and, as it happened, 
bottom side up, but with care. Her feet were 
drawn up close to her body, nor had she once 
tried to strike with bill or claws. The next 
moment, slipping easily through my fingers, 
she flew downward, then up and, after circling 
a little nearer, away, calling kill-cc kilj-ee 
kill-ec. 
A faint checking drew my attention back to 
the nest. Again thrusting my hand carefully 
into that interesting . grab-bag, I pulled out 
the softest, daintiest, tiniest peeping thing 
imaginable, a newly hatched sparrowhawk. 
Except for the flesh-colored feet and bill, the 
latter having a rather conspicuous egg-cutting 
bump, he was covered with white down. 
After putting him back with his one or two 
brothers or sisters, I stayed only long enough 
to throw out a couple of handfuls of coarse 
chips and, with them, incidentally, some of the 
ABNORMAL KUDU HORNS. 
outgrown egg-shells and a shred of skin, fur 
attached, of some small mammal. 
On both-of my visits I had seen a sparrow- 
hawk near the nest site, but he was remark¬ 
ably wild, flying off at my approach, and per¬ 
fectly silent. No doubt this was the male. 
The female, in all probability, was sitting on 
her hatching eggs at the time I discovered the 
nest and shook the stub so violently, for that 
was the afternoon of the day before I found 
the nestlings as described. 
Is there not something peculiarly pleasing 
and wonderful in the idea of one of these 
"Arabs of the air" so devotedly and tenderly 
brooding its helpless nestlings? When first 
I peeped into the nest I observed the familiar 
brown barred back and the no less familiar 
long barred tail of the sitting bird. But the 
attitude suggested a robin, as I have said, or 
a dove. Looking into the upturned eyes, I 
felt, "this is not the hawk I know,” a tiger 
among birds. They were not cruel black eyes, 
but only large, brooding, and impenetrable. 
Somehow the tearing beak was toned down, as 
if shaped for caressing. The dark symmetrical 
streaks on the beautiful quiet head no longer 
suggested the splashes of war-paint on the 
cheeks of a savage. The talons were hidden—- 
buried indeed, and not for the first time, in the 
soft plumage of a little bird; but how seldom 
before with any tenderness! What had soft¬ 
ened those eyes and dulled that beak and. so 
to speak, changed those sword-like talons into 
pruning-hooks—mother love, instinct, or both? 
Whatever the truth, here is a fact, at least, 
which the great theory does not seem to ac¬ 
count for. Such faithful brooding is well 
known to be of common occurrence among 
birds in general, though naturally it has been 
least observed among species like the sparrow- 
hawk, that nests in the more inaccessible places. 
When men so often meet with such cases, 
what thousands of birds, together with their 
eggs and young, must each year fall an easy 
prey to the host of enemies in whom a con¬ 
science never wakes, that hunt them by day 
and by night, goaded by hunger, and aided by 
senses far more keen than man’s! 
\\ ould it not seem more to the advantage 
of the species if the sitting bird did not go to 
quite such an extreme? Leaving the nest a little 
sooner, she would at least occasionally be 
pursued, to the possible saving of her eggis or 
young; or, at all events, she herself would be 
spared and so left free to raise her broods; 
such broods to inherit, one would think, their 
parent’s discretion. Thus natural selection 
should long ago have weeded ou? that fatal 
tendency; a weeding out which, as before 
remarked, has not taken place. 
Edmund J. Sawyer. 
Odd Kudu Horns. 
Not long ago Forest and Stream published 
an account of some odd antelope horns, in which 
was mentioned the fact that occasionally a head 
was seen where the horn is bent down over the 
face, and it was suggested that such unusual 
horns were the result of some accident by which 
the horn core was broken, the bone afterward 
knitting in this unusual position. 
In a recent number of the London Field ap¬ 
pears the picture of a skull of a greater kudu 
shot in East Africa in 1910. One of the horns, 
the right, bends down over the face, curves in¬ 
ward, passes into the skull under the left eye 
and emerges between the eyes. In its growth 
the horn narrowly missed the brain case. The 
animal was killed by Captain' Morland, of the 
First King’s African Rifles, who declared that 
when killed it v r as in good condition. The nor¬ 
mal horn measures on the outside curve thirty- 
eight inches, and has a circumference at the base 
of eight inches. The abnormal horn measures 
on the outside curve but twenty-one and a half 
inches, and the circumference at the base is eight 
