... Birds

I have often v.-oudered at the ease with which a groat big hen hawk drops f rom ou high, like a falling shot, hitting so accurately its quarry on the ground, for at the moment of beginning its desoeut it closes its wings almost tight against its sides and goes as true as a plumb line. Before it reaches the ground its speed becomes so rapid that you hear the air fairly shriek through its feathers, and the lieavy thnd of the blow at the last is of deadly suggestion. I have seen a full grown hare snatched up into the air limp and dead after such a performance and borne away dangling in a grip of fate. An expert trapeze man does raany wonderful things, but his extremest cleverness cannot equal that oí' a hawk which I saw dart under a flying kingfisher, turn back downward and catch the bird in the breast. Hawks, however, are not more expert thau kingfishers themselves. The belted halcyou makes an unerring missile of himself when he sees a minnow shining in a pool of the brook, and from 50 feet distance goes, like a blue flash, to the silvery point. Chuck! Up leap a thousand shining drops and fall around like rain, while that animated and winged flsh spear comes forth from its plunge with the minnow safely held. Well may Halcyon giggle a raucoua, clattering strain of joy. He has done what no man of us can learn to da The drowsy looking little pewee flycatcher of our woods does almost impossible feats of agility in taking on the wing some species of dancing insects. I have seen one of these birds turn three or four complete somersaults in the air before final lyhe caught his gnat, which, like Galatea in the idyl, skipped hither and yon and up and down after the manner of a harl of dry thistle down. A kinsman of the pewee, the tyrant flycatcher, shows how a light and plucky tilter in the fields of air can outdo his most savage foe, by dint of superior cleverness, at lofty tumbling. Many a time have I seen him bobbing up and down above a worried and disheveled hawk so high in the air that he looked like á bee harassing the wide winged thing, mounting and hurrying through the hyacinth spaces of a summer sky. Our black capped titmouse is inimitable as a trapeze performer when he gets good hold of a twig's end. He can swing head downward, sidewise, curved till beak and tail touch, swing by one foot, and the wind may blow as hard as it can, he never loses his grip. No wonder Emerson loved him for his pluck and nerve. Some years ago it created a stir in old London when an athlete climbed to a temple's arch and hung head downward from a beam, but what is a feat like that when compared with what you may see any June moming when a titmouse hangs by one claw to the topmost leaf of some tall forest tree and the wind blowing boisterously? Have you never seen two cock blue jays fighting in midair? There is a joust of brilliance. They whirl over and over so fast that they look like a blur of amethyst smoke, shot with gleams of white fire, and how their wings clash and their bilis clack! The inocJring bird, greatest of all the wildwood singers, has his own way of showing off his athletic nimbleness and grace. He somersaults backward in the midst of a staccato strain and never loses a note. Let some tenor try it in the