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The thing there the infinitude of open sand and rock was beautiful, wonderful, even glorious. She looked again. Steep black-cindered slope, with its soft gray patches of grass, sheered down and down, and out in rolling slope to merge upon a cedar-dotted level. Nothing moved below, but a red-tailed hawk sailed across her vision.
He gave a few chips, just to do his share in warning the other forest-people to look out for the red-tailed hawk; and then he crept into a thicket and kept just as still as a mouse. When Frisky heard the news for he knew what the birds were telling one another he hurried along joyfully. He was not afraid of Mr. Hawk. Mr. Hawk was the very person he was looking for. "Hello, you old ruffian!"
Indeed, the entire performance did remind Hugh of occasions when he had watched a red-tailed hawk chasing a frightened bunny, now slowing up on quivering pinions, then making numerous pretended lunges in order to frighten the quarry still more, and finally ending the pursuit by a well-directed swoop that gave the bird of prey its fine dinner. The two men were bewildered as well as alarmed.
It was not a scream as is often heard with these birds but a cry of different import, as if a call to some comrade. It was so in fact, for in a moment it was answered from a distant part of the woods; and the next moment, another hawk red-tailed like himself, but much larger was seen soaring upwards. This was evidently his mate for the female of these birds is always much larger than the males.
The eggs, three in number, were of light flesh-color, uniformly specked with fine brown specks. The cavity of the nest was so deep that the back of the sitting bird sank below the edge. In the top of a tall tree, a short distance farther on, I saw the nest of the red-tailed hawk, a large mass of twigs and dry sticks.
I remember that in my latest conversation with Thoreau, last December, he mentioned most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his unerring eyes. The Hawk most common at Concord, the Red-Tailed species, is not known near the sea-shore, twenty miles off, as at Boston or Plymouth.
The trees had a half-scared look, and that indescribable wildness which lurks about the tops of all remote mountains possessed the place. Standing there, I looked down upon the back of the red-tailed hawk as he flew out over the earth beneath me. Following him, my eye also took in farms and settlements and villages and other mountain ranges that grew blue in the distance.
These birds prey upon fish; some, as the red-tailed tropic bird, darting upon the flying-fish; and others, as the darters, boldly plunging into the tide from overhanging boughs, in search of their favourite prey; here, too, is the common Cormorant. Four more cases remain for examination, and then the visitor will have closed his inspection of the museum specimens of birds.
Their movements when in the air are very majestic and beautiful to the eye, being in every respect identical with those of our common hen or red-tailed hawk. They sail along in the same calm, effortless, interminable manner, and sweep around in the same ample spiral.
During the next twenty-four hours I saw and heard, either right around the house or while walking down to bathe, through the woods, the following forty-two birds: Little green heron, night heron, red-tailed hawk, yellow-billed cuckoo, kingfisher, flicker, humming-bird, swift, meadow-lark, red-winged blackbird, sharp-tailed finch, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, bush sparrow, purple finch, Baltimore oriole, cowbunting, robin, wood thrush, thrasher, catbird, scarlet tanager, red-eyed vireo, yellow warbler, black-throated green warbler, kingbird, wood peewee, crow, blue jay, cedar-bird, Maryland yellowthroat, chickadee, black and white creeper, barn swallow, white-breasted swallow, ovenbird, thistlefinch, vesperfinch, indigo bunting, towhee, grasshopper-sparrow, and screech owl.
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