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 50 Bird - Lore

ing Icame again, alone. to try once more. One event of the preceding day, of which I had taken little note at the time, gave me a good deal of hope as I now scanned the hillside from below. The female had sailed down with a quarry to a place between the two cliffs, where from above I could see nothing but trees, and a sound unlike her usual calling had seemed to come from there after she had alighted. Knowing, however, that the Falcons sometimes sat on.trees (I had seen one of them do it that very morning), and seeing no rocks at the place, I had ignored the new- note evidence as probably an error, and dismissed the matter for the time. (There was no tree on the hillside which could have furnished asuitable nesting cavityi) But now, looking from below, I was delighted to see an isolated cliff of fair size underneath the place where the Hawk had seemed to alight. I climbed toward this cliﬂ with renewed hope, which was soon increased by the mother's appearing overhead and beginning a series of frantic plunges toward me, in a more determined fashion than ever before. When I tried to scale the cliff, which at that point was only about fifty feet high above the steep, wooded slope, she hurled herself at me, wildly screaming, in such a frenzy of passion that I half expected to have to fight her, The noble great bird always checked herself, however, just before she reached my head. and swerved aside, with a strong rustling of her sharp, steely, marvelously wielded wings. The cliff itself proved unclimbable at that point, so l scrambled up the steep, sapling-covered slope that bordered it, and presently came out on the flat top of the rock-face, shaded by small birches and hemlocks. The mother was more furious than ever, and I could not doubt that the nest was somewhere on the little cliﬂ. Eagerly peering over, I at once espied white down-feathers, gleaming through the leaves of a bitch; and in another second was feasting my sight on three princely, dark-eyed young Peregrines, about four weeks old, with many brown contour-feathers sticking through their milky ﬂuﬁ. Success at last! Their ledge. for a wonder, was within easy reach from above, and I was soon on it with them, deafened by the redoubled screechings of the anguished mother, and the concerted guinea-hen clatter of the youngsters. Approached too closely, they threw themselves upon their backs, and fought valiantly with bill and claws. Their feet were blue-gray and of ungainly bigness, and their toes sometimes doubled up sideways under them as they hobbled about.

The ledge, which was covered with the wreckage of hens, Chickens, Pigeons. Flickers and Blue Jays, as well as with excrement 'and pellets, was about six feet long by three feet wide, and overlooked most of the hill- side It was entirely inaccessible from below. but the merest child's play to reach from above, being only about ten feet from the top. and shaded by birch saplings which gave ample hand~hold for a descent. There was even one sapling growing on the ledge itself. No vestiges of true nest-