Watertown Republican

Young Fish-Hawks

The young fish-hawks are the funniest things you ever saw, awkward and misshapen, and yet with such a wise, dignified expression! I watched for several hours a couple learning to fly. They sat balanced uneasily on the edge of the nest, solemn and grave as judges, and looked as if they had come out of the shell knowing everything. The old birds were coaxing and going through various exercises which I suppose were the first principles of flying, and the young ones tilted about and rolled over, and finally got fastened between the sharp branches of the tree. The mother and father fussed and scolded, "Bill-ee Bill-ee. Stu-pid-i-ty." The young are very slow in learning to fly—and I have heard that they often linger in the nest long after they are able to help themselves, to be fed and waited upon, till driven away by the parents, who beat them out with their wings and pick them with their sharp beaks. I don't like to think this, but it may be so, for one day we found a young bird drooping on the fence. He allowed us to come very close to him, and we discovered that his wing was broken. It was not shot so he must have fallen in his effort to fly. No birds were near him, he had evidently been deserted. He looked forlorn and pitiful, so we took him home and put him in the wagon-house. The children were very attentive to him; they cut up fish for him—pounds of it—and tried to amuse him as if he were a lamed child. But it was of no use, he drooped still more, and then died and was buried with martial noise and pomp. He would not have been a successful pet, for these birds have a lonely, isolated nature. They seem to have bred in them the wild, untamable spirit of the wind and wave, and if deprived of their free, soaring flight, and their sportings in the air and water they will languish and die.—St. Nicholas.