My friend at Heatley, who used to have the owls as his tenants, once (in 1897) shot a sparrow hawk near his house that had a screaming blackbird in his talons, and was tearing off from its back strips of feathers and flesh together without apparently having tried to kill it first. He told me that twice he had seen a lark escape from a sparrow hawk. In both instances the lark's idea seemed to be to rise higher than the hawk, and the two kept going up together. The hawk made repeated stoops at his quarry, but each time he missed, the lark striking now to the right and now to the left. The contest ended in both cases by the lark dashing down to cover from a great height; one time it found refuge among the shrubs in a garden, and on the second occasion it came down faster than he could describe with its wings closed against its sides, and just slanting over the tops of some fruit trees opposite, dashed straight into the kitchen. To do this it had to pass through the sliding door of the back-kitchen, which was not more than two feet open, and then through the open door of the kitchen. Strange to say, it was able to check its speed sufficiently to alight uninjured on the floor, though utterly exhausted and helpless. My friend picked it up, and having held it for some minutes in his hand, let it fly away seeming none the worse for its perilous adventure. The hawk, he said, sailed calmly once or twice round the house before he took himself off. The following is part of a letter I received in November, 1894:--"A sparrow hawk took up his nightly abode on the transome of the top light of a window in Arley Chapel in the autumn of 1890, and remained constant to that roosting place until, at all events, May, 1892, when we left Arley. How long it stayed there after we left I cannot say, but I was told last winter that it had disappeared. The hawk was always solitary; I never saw it with a companion. The roost was always exactly on the same stone." One has heard stories of other birds living the same kind of lonely existence, but I never saw a very satisfactory explanation as to how it is that they come to do so. The pairing instinct is strong in birds, and it must be a powerful motive that makes them disregard it. We are told that if a bird of prey loses its mate it does not take it long to find another. May we suppose that solitary birds like this at Arley are waiting in readiness for such an emergency? Or is such a bird simply one that, being old and cantankerous, is bored by female society, or feels himself unequal to the cares of a family?