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48 Bird- Lore courts ; the intense lieat, which makes the birds loll and fidget ; the pleasant effluvium, evidencing garter-snakes, and such like, and above all, the habit the birds have of sneaking away just as one has them nicely posed, — these are some of the amenities of this sort of pho- tography. Yet there are compensations. Call it hypnosis, or what you will, the young birds, until thirty-five days old. when the feathers are quite fully grown, show themselves to be most patient sitters, even when, to speak Irishly, they are lying on their backs. All this, if one keeps his eye upon them. Thus, one four weeks' old bird lay on his back not less than twenty minutes in the blazing sun with his MARSH HAWKS, 24 DAYS OLD eyes wide open, the blue-bottles buzzing about his head, and the mosquitoes plying their beaks upon his cere. At this age the young birds seem to become quite inured to the sun, yet the" now spend most of their time at some distance from the nest — from ten to fifty feet — the paths that the}' several!}' and collectively use becoming by this time well beaten and strewn with pellets and the cast-off elements of their plumage. At about thirty-four days the first real attempt at flight begins. No longer now. when the young bird is traced to his lair, will he throw himself upon his back, in open-beaked defiance ; but he rises at once just from under one's feet, and flaps, not ungrace- fully, along the grass or bush-tops. At about forty days from birth the young make fairly long flights, rising even above the tree-tops, amid which some of them have been reared. Such is the life-history of a young Marsh Hawk — from egg to air. Thirty days in the shell, and forty days a'growing — after who knows how man}- days of site-surveying and nest-building, in all