At Oyster Bay on a desolate winter afternoon many years ago I shot an Ipswich sparrow on a strip of ice-rimmed beach, where the long coarse grass waved in front of a growth of blue berries, beach plums and stunted pines. I think it was the same winter that we were visited not only by flocks of cross-bills, pine linnets, red-polls and pine grossbeaks, but by a number of snowy owls, which flitted to and fro in ghost-like fashion across the wintry landscape and showed themselves far more diurnal in their habits than our native owls. One fall about the same time a pair of duck-hawks appeared off the bay. It was early, before many ducks had come, and they caused havoc among the night herons, which were then very numerous in the marshes around Lloyd’s Neck, there being a big heronry in the woods near by. Once I saw a duck-hawk come around the bend of the shore, and dart into a loose gang of young night herons, still in the brown plumage, which had jumped from the marsh at my approach. The pirate struck down three herons in succession and sailed swiftly on without so much as looking back at his victims.[8] The herons, which are usually rather dull birds, showed every sign of terror whenever the duck-hawk appeared in the distance; whereas, they paid no heed to the fish-hawks as they sailed overhead. I found the carcass of a black-headed or Bonaparte’s gull which had probably been killed by one of these duck-hawks; these gulls appear in the early fall, before their bigger brothers, the herring gulls, have come for their winter stay. The spotted sand-pipers often build far away from water; while riding, early in July, 1907, near Cold Spring, my horse almost stepped on a little fellow that could only just have left the nest. It was in a dry road between upland fields; the parents were near by, and betrayed much agitation. The little fish-crows are not rare around Washington, though not so common as the ordinary crows; once I shot one at Oyster Bay. They are not so wary as their larger kinsfolk, but are quite as inveterate destroyers of the eggs and nestlings of more attractive birds. The soaring turkey buzzards, so beautiful on the wing and so loathsome near by, are seen everywhere around the Capital. Footnote 8: Dr. Lambert last fall, on a hunting trip in Northern Quebec, found a gyrfalcon on an island in a lake which had just killed a great blue heron; the heron’s feathers were scattered all over the lake. Lambert also shot a great horned owl in the dusk one evening, and found that it had a half-eaten duck in its claws.