Pratt gave me the wing of a sparrow (?) hawk which he shot some months ago. He was coming from his house to his shop early in the morning when he saw this small hawk, which looked like a pigeon, fly past him over the Common with a sparrow in his clutches, and alight about six feet up the south button wood in front of Tolman’s. Having a small Maynard’s revolver in his pocket, loaded with a ball size of a pea, he followed, and, standing twenty-two paces from the tree in the road, aimed and brought down both hawk and sparrow at a distance of about six rods, cutting off the wing of the former with the ball. This he confessed he could not do again if he should try a hundred times.
It must be a sparrow hawk, according to Wilson and Nuttall, for the inner vanes of the primaries and secondaries are thickly spotted with brownish white.
Humphrey Buttrick says that he hears the note of the woodcock from the village in April and early in May (too late now); that there were some this year breeding or singing by the riverside in front of Abel Heywood’s. He says that when you see one spring right up straight into the air, you may go to the spot, and he will surely come down again after some minutes to within a few feet of the same spot and of you.
Has known a partridge to fly at once from one to two miles after being wounded (tracked them by the blood) without alighting. Says he has caught as many as a dozen partridges in his hands. He lies right down on them, or where he knows them to be, then passes his hands back and forth under his body till he feels them. You must not lift your body at all or they will surely squeeze out, and when you feel one must be sure you get hold of their legs or head, and not feathers merely.
To-day is suddenly overpowering warm. Thermometer at 1 P. M., 94° in the shade! but in the afternoon it suddenly fell to 56, and it continued cold the next two days.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 24, 1856
It must be a sparrow hawk . . . See July 2, 1856 (“Looked at the birds in the Natural History Rooms in Boston. Observed no white spots on the sparrow hawk’s wing, or on the pigeon or sharp-shinned hawk’s. Indeed they were so closed that I could not have seen them. Am uncertain to which my wing belongs.”); May 4, 1855 ("I think that what I have called the sparrow hawk falsely, and latterly pigeon hawk, is also the sharp-shinned”); April 16, 1855 ( What I call a pigeon hawk, probably sharp-shinned.”) May 8, 1854 (“Saw a small hawk flying low, about size of a robin — tail with black bars — probably a sparrow hawk; . . . The sparrow hawk is a rather reddish brown and finely and thickly barred above with black.”); October 6, 1859 ("Examine the pigeon and sparrow hawks in the Natural History collection. . . .The sparrow hawks are decidedly red-brown with bluish heads and blue or slate sides; also are much more thickly barred with dark on wing-coverts, back, and tail than the pigeon hawk"). see also J. J. Audubon ("Every one knows the Sparrow-Hawk [Falco sparverius], the very mention of its name never fails to bring to mind some anecdote connected with its habits . . .”) and A Book of the Seasons by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Hawk (Merlin)
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021
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