Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/284

Rh hen, and two thrushes as provision for two nestlings. However, there is always some compensation, for in one which I examined were the skeletons of two snakes and a rat picked to the bone.

The accompanying vignette will, I trust, although the nests are so exactly alike, be of some interest. Whilst the artist was sketching the honey-buzzard's nest, the old bird, the first which I had noticed in 1862, made its appearance and circled round the tree, uttering its peculiar short shrill squeak. This nest, which had been repaired in the previous year, the dead beech-leaves still hanging on to the twigs, was between forty and fifty feet from the ground; whilst that of the common buzzard, who, whilst sitting, had, a month before, been killed, was upwards of seventy feet, and placed on the very topmost boughs of a beech, on which tree was also the other.

But more important than even the nesting of the 266