The common buzzard (_Falco buteo_) is a resident all through the year in the Forest, and may now and then be seen towering high up in the air, so high that you would not at first notice him, unless you heard his wild scream. It is not, however, nearly so plentiful as formerly. He is a sad coward, and the common crow will not only attack, but defeat him. Once or twice I have seen their battles during the breeding season. The jays, and magpies, too, and even the pewits, will mob him, the latter striking at him almost like a falcon. Its favourite breeding-places are in the Denny and Bratley Woods, Sloden, Birchen Hat, Mark Ash, and Prior’s Acre. Several nests are yearly taken, for the bird generally breeds when the bark-strippers are at work in April and May. A series of its eggs, in my collection, taken in the Forest, show every variety of colouring from nearly pure white to richly blotched specimens. In the breeding-season the birds are excessively destructive. A boy who climbed up to a nest in the spring of 1860 told me that he found no less than two young rabbits, a grey hen, and two thrushes as provision for two nestlings. However, there is always some compensation, for in one which I examined were the skeletons of two snakes and a rat picked to the bone. [Illustration: Common Buzzard’s Nest.] [Illustration: Honey-Buzzard’s Nest.] The accompanying vignette will, I trust, although the nests are so exactly alike, be of some interest. Whilst the artist was sketching the honey-buzzard’s nest, the old bird, the first which I had noticed in 1862, made its appearance and circled round the tree, uttering its peculiar short shrill squeak. This nest, which had been repaired in the previous year, the dead beech-leaves still hanging on to the twigs, was between forty and fifty feet from the ground; whilst that of the common buzzard, who, whilst sitting, had, a month before, been killed, was upwards of seventy feet, and placed on the very topmost boughs of a beech, on which tree was also the other.