Page:The Common Birds of Bombay.djvu/42

26 but inclined upwards, so that the figure of the whole bird is like a very flat V. The Sea Eagle lives chiefly on sea serpents. They are forced to come to the surface frequently to breathe and are more easily caught than fishes. They are all venomous, but the Eagle does not mind that. The fact is that a sea snake is so utterly helpless out of water that, when clutched by the middle and borne away through the air, it can do nothing but dangle like a string. The Sea Eagle makes an enormous nest of sticks in a tree and uses it year after year, till all the ground under it is thickly sown with the bones of snakes and and fishes. On the mainland the tree selected is generally a very high one, but on small, solitary islands I have seen nests scarcely fifteen feet from the ground. About November two eggs are laid, of a greenish-white colour, and as the young ones grow up there is great ado about satisfying their voracious appetites. In a nest I visited one January, with only a single young one, I found a fresh fish 9 or 10 inches long and a half-eaten snake. For months after they leave the nest the young follow their parents about, crying, like the daughters of the horseleach, "Give, give," and the loud and harsh kak, kak, kak, from which the bird gets its native name Kakan, may be heard all day.

Another water bird must come in here, though the latest investigations into its inside seem to convict it of being half an owl. I mean the Osprey, or Fish Hawk (Pandion haliætus). It is not a resident with us, but comes for the cold season, when it may be seen all along the sea coast and on every large river. The Osprey is an exceedingly handsome bird in the