Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/167

Rh rank may be, there is a strange mix-up in the chirography of the instrument. As to wings and tail and beak and talons, he bears the insignia of a grand connection. It needs an expert to read the document, which, if it shows relation to a noble stock, shows also that Sir Harrier has very ignoble ways. His very mode of hunting is a disgrace to the name of falcon. He will course low in air like a base-born buzzard, and will dog about a small area like a hound after a rabbit, backward and forward, round and round, crossing and recrossing his course, literally scouring a patch of shrub or bush, or perhaps tall reeds or dank meadow, and harrowing the poor occupant so vulture-like, and so utterly unlike the decisiveness of action and brilliancy of dash of the genuine falcon that, with the whir of a rifle-shot, swoops from its observatory in the sky. Not one of these royal points can the marsh-hawk claim. He harries or worries his victim, and so comes honestly by his unenviable name. Although, as a high authority declares, "he is no weakling nor coward," yet he is for his belongings a mean, bullying fellow. Let us watch him from this tree.



He is harrowing a meadow-hen with her young. He has been at this worriment full fifteen minutes. Now he makes a pounce for one of the little ones. But the mother-bird proves herself a heroine on the spur, and puts him to a mean retreat. And then what hawk but he, sloven that he is, would nest upon the ground so vulture-like? There is also a tendency to fluffiness in his plumage, and a cattish noiselessness in his movements, and his queer phiz has a little of the owlish cast. Well, there is no use in denying it, it is true of him, and all these harriers, as Dr. Coues observes, "They look like owls, behave like buzzards, and nest like vultures." Hence, "the marsh-hawk combines, in a notable degree, the characters of several raptorial types, being, in particular, a link between hawks and owls."