It is in their family life that hawks and eagles, however cruel at other times, show some truly lovable traits. Once mated, they know neither divorce nor family quarrels all their lives. Home is the dearest spot on earth to them. They become passionately attached to the great bundle of trash that is at once their nest and their abode. A tall pine tree, near water, or the rocky ledge of some steep cliff, is the favourite site for an eagle eyrie. Here the devoted mates will carry an immense quantity of {222} sticks, sod, cornstalks, pine twigs, weeds, bones, and other coarse rubbish, until, after annual repairs for several seasons, the broad, flat nest may grow to be almost as high as it is wide and look something like a New York sky-scraper. Both parents sit on the eggs in turn and devote themselves with zeal to feeding the eaglets. These spoiled children remain in the nest several months without attempting to fly, expecting to be waited upon even after they are actually larger than the old birds. The castings of skins, bones, hair, scales, etc., in the vicinity of a hawk's or eagle's nest, will indicate, almost as well as Dr. Fisher's analysis, what food the babies had in their stomachs to make them grow so big. Immature birds are almost black all over. Not until they are three years old do the feathers on their heads and necks turn white, giving them the effect of being bald. Any eagle seen in the eastern United States is sure to be of this species. In the West and throughout Asia and Africa lives the golden eagle, of which Tennyson wrote the lines that apply equally well to our Eastern "bird of freedom": "He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls: He watches from his mountain walls. And, like a thunderbolt, he falls." {223} AMERICAN SPARROW HAWK _Called also: Killy Hawk; Rusty-crowned Falcon; Mouse Hawk._ Just such an extended branch as a shrike or a kingbird would use as a lookout while searching the landscape o'er for something to eat, the little sparrow hawk chooses for the same purpose. He is not much larger than either of these birds, scarcely longer than a robin. Because he is a hawk, with the family possession of eyes that are both telescope and microscope, he can detect a mouse, sparrow, garter snake, spider or grasshopper, farther away than seems to us possible.