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I recollect also a coloured print of the great Napoleon commanding at some battle in which he was victorious, seated upon a white horse and waving a field-marshal's baton over piles of dead and wounded; and near the window, hanging to the reeds of the ceiling, the nest of a pair of red-tailed swallows, pretty creatures that, notwithstanding the mess they made, afforded to Marie and me endless amusement in the intervals of our work.
Until 1909, the inhabitants consisted of the Laysan albatross, black-footed albatross, sooty tern, gray-backed tern, noddy tern, Hawaiian tern, white tern, Bonin petrel, two shearwaters, the red-tailed tropic bird, two boobies and the man-of-war bird. Laysan Island is two miles long by one and one-half miles broad, and at times it has been literally covered with birds.
For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field every afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and soaring with the airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly conjectured, so secretive are the little people of Naboth's field.
After making a short double, a loop and a baulk in case the dog should come back, Molly returned to find that Rag in his eagerness was standing bolt upright and craning his neck to see the sport. This disobedience made her so angry that she struck him with her hind foot and knocked him over in the mud. One day as they fed on the near clover field a red-tailed hawk came swooping after them.
Old Ben and Young Ben and Linn, the bird dogs; the dachshunds; the mongrels of the men's quarters; all the domestic fowls; the innumerable and blue-blooded hogs; the polo ponies and brood mares, the stud horses and driving horses and cow horses, colts, yearlings, the young and those enjoying a peaceful and honourable old age; Pollymckittrick; Redmond's cat and fifty others, half-wild creatures; vireos and orioles in the trees around the house; thousands and thousands of blackbirds rising in huge swarms like gnats; full-voiced meadowlarks on the fence posts; herons stalking solemnly, or waiting like so many Japanese bronzes for a chance at a gopher; red-tailed hawks circling slowly; pigeon hawks passing with their falcon dart; little gaudy sparrow hawks on top the telephone poles; buzzards, stately and wonderful in flight, repulsive when at rest; barn-owls dwelling in the haystacks, and horned owls in the hollow trees; the game in countless numbers; all the smaller animals and tiny birds in species too numerous to catalogue, all these drew their full sustenance of life from the ranch's smiling abundance.
Hawk swooped down and tried to seize him. There was another reason, too, why Frisky wanted to find Mr. Hawk again and that was because he knew that it annoyed Mr. Hawk very much not to be able to catch him. You see, Frisky Squirrel was a great tease. Well, as I said, Frisky hunted all through the woods for the red-tailed hawk. But he couldn't find him.
We love the screaming of the red-tailed hawks as they soar high overhead, and even the calls of the night heron that nest in the tall water maples by one of the wood ponds on our place, and the little green herons that nest beside the salt marsh. It is hard to tell just how much of the attraction in any bird-note lies in the music itself and how much in the associations.
Suddenly he disappeared from beside me, and the next that I saw or heard of him he was hard at work pirouetting on the deck below with a red-tailed demon, and exhibiting in his steps a "verve" and a graceful audacity which at Paris would have certainly obtained for him the honours of expulsion at the hands of the municipal authorities.
Red-tailed Hawk, 2; Northern Flicker, 3; Blue Jay, 3; American Crow, 80; Starling, 6; Meadowlark, 2; Goldfinch, 7; Junco, 5; Song Sparrow, 42; Swamp Sparrow, 2; Myrtle Warbler, 50; Brown Creeper, 2; Chickadee, 50; Golden-crowned Kinglet, 3. Total, 14 species, 256 individuals. Fairfield, Conn.
These are the turkey vulture, the black vulture, the little rusty-crowned falcon, the pigeon hawk, slate-coloured hawk, red-tailed buzzard, American horned owl, little American owl, and five other species of falcons. The perchers are less widely distributed.
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