Among the Buteos.
The voices of our New England Buzzards are again ringing through their old haunts, and it may now be seasonable to review my local notes on their breeding habits last Spring. In short, then, I took 104 eggs. And from other nests in my circle of observation were taken or destroyed by farmers, hawk-hunters and others, sixty more eggs and young birds. So until a more favored breeding range is made known I shall claim this to be the home of the Buteos. A correspondent in Rochester writes that he thinks as many eggs can be taken yearly in that vicinity, but until this is shown to be true I shall not believe the distribution of species is so equal. If this article could be accompanied by a good physical map of Norwich and its environs, it would help greatly to support my claims. An irregular line drawn around the city just outside the suburbs would pass through the breeding places of sixteen pairs of Red-shouldered Hawks which I marked down the second week in April. Except a few hemlocks, the groves and strips of first growth are all deciduous and nearly all nut-bearing. The red squirrel, which is not so relentlessly shot down as his gray cousin, is amazingly plenty in these suburban woods. While skating yesterday on Yantic cove, within the city limits, I saw seven squirrels playing in the small patch above Christ’s church on the river bank. Every one who has climbed to nests of young Buteos nearly fledged, must have been astonished at the great quantity of these young rodents, supplied by the parent birds. In one nest of Red-tailed Hawks I have seen portions of nine red squirrels, and from another have counted out on the ground seven entire bodies. A game bird or chicken now and then, but red squirrels for every day bill-of-fare. Mousing, Master Buteo will go. And frogging, too, for I have several times surprised him in muddy sloughs in the woods, and field collectors often are called to notice the black mud on fresh Hawk’s eggs. Given then a great food supply and the species that follow it will be abundant. Over the grove of second growths to the left of Love Lane, last Spring, I saw a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks hovering for days in succession. I knew they were not breeding in the patch, as they had not done so in former years, and there were but three old Crow’s nests very low down. But to be very sure I examined the grove repeatedly with care and found it to be alive with red squirrels. In one apple-tree hole was a litter of six; in the butt of an oak were five with eyes unopened, and the conspicuous outside nests were many. A Barred Owl clung to the top of a white birch with one claw, and was tearing away at a squirrel’s new domed nest with the other claw. The Hawks had their nest with two young in the swamp beyond, and this grove was their handy larder, and very noisy they were over their daily grace before meat.
The Buteos’ nests from which my ’82 series was taken, were for the most part old ones, the very few exceptions being smaller than those used for several seasons. The use of an old nest by the Great-horned Owl is habitual. The Barred Owl takes a hole when it can find one, and if not, an old nest. Failing there, he builds a very small nest of the flimsiest sort. To show the dislike of our Raptores to nidification, let me reproduce an avian drama to which usher nature gave me a free pass and open stall last Spring. The scene opens late in March on Plain Hill, where a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks were furbishing up the nest in which off and on they had bred for five years. Their dalliance was pleasant, no doubt, but dangerously long, for a Barred Owl slipped in and laid two eggs April 1 and 3. The Hawks were virtually indignant, and were often seen to dash down towards the nest, as if to dispossess the intruder, but they always wisely stopped a few inches above the snapping bill and mass of fluffy feathers with nine points of law in its favor. The Hawks at length went across a small swamp and re-upholstered the nest in which the Owl bred in ’81. I now took the two Owl’s eggs, supposing the clutch complete, but she then went across the swamp and laid the third egg in her old tenement. When I climbed to the second nest, with the Hawks in possession, it contained three Buteo’s eggs and one Barred Owl’s. Blowing showed that the Owl’s egg was slightly incubated, and it would have been interesting perhaps to have let nature had her course with this motley clutch. The unwearied owl now went back to the first nest and laid and hatched her second clutch of two eggs. Ovipositing after a while again becoming a necessity for the Hawks, they too repaired to the opening scene of our drama from high life, and after a few noisy demonstrations against the Owl, took up their new quarters in a tree within gunshot of the first. The nest was so small I could not believe that even our smallest Buteo (pennsylvanicus), could breed in it, though I saw the great female Red-shouldered come from it, and could see that it was feathered through my field glass. Climbing showed it to have a very large and bright initial egg, which was riddled with shot the next day by so-called hawk-hunters. The marauders completed the series of reprisals by carrying away my young owls.
Aside from my first object, I have dwelt on the final details of this little tragedy, because it also is a fair illustration of the domestic troubles of the Rapaciæ here in the breeding season. With every man’s hand against them—hunter, farmer and collector—it is a continued source of wonder that so many eggs are taken and so many hawks left. Some may be alien birds drawn by the food supply. But as a solution to this question it is not unreasonable to suppose that later in the season when the farmers are busy with field work and the collector is eagerly following the small birds in their Summer homes in the outskirts of the woods, that made wary by pursuit, and screened by the dense foliage, the resident Buteos manage to “steal” an occasional nest and bring up enough young to keep up the old local race. This idea is in part born out by the fact that in my Winter tramps through our leafless woods, I now and then run across a Hawk’s nest which I knew was not there the year before and the first chapter of whose life history had not been revealed to me.—J. M. W., Norwich, Conn.