Note 39 — First, Of Birds.[34]

This was the best that our author could say of the eagles of New England. Wood assists us once more here: “The eagles of the country be of two sorts,—one like the eagles that be in England; the other is something bigger, with a great white head and white tail. These be commonly called gripes.”—New-Eng. Prospect, l. c. The first spoken of by Wood—and perhaps, also, what Josselyn names last—may be the common or ring-tailed eagle, now known to be the young of the golden eagle. The second of Wood, and first of our author, is without doubt, the bald eagle; the (so to say) tyrannical habits of which bird are sufficiently well known, at least in the vivid pages of Wilson. See the Voyages, p. 96; where we learn also that “hawkes there are of several kinds; as goshawks, falcons, laniers, sparrow-hawkes, and a little black hawke highly prized by the Indians, who wear them on their heads, and is accounted of worth sufficient to ransom a sagamour. They are so strangely couragious and hardie that nothing flyeth in the air that they will not bind with. I have seen them tower so high, that they have been so small that scarcely could they be taken by the eye” (p. 95-6). Wood makes like mention of this little black hawk (New-Eng. Prospect, l. c.); and R. Williams (Key into the Language of the Indians of N. E., in Hist. Coll., vol. iii. p. 220) calls it “sachim, a little bird about the bigness of a swallow, or less; to which the Indians give that name, because of its sachem or prince-like courage and command over greater birds: that a man shall often see this small bird pursue and vanquish and put to flight the crow and other birds far bigger than itself.” This was our well-known king-bird; and Josselyn, on the same page, tells us of “a small ash-colour bird that is shaped like a hawke, with talons and beak, that falleth upon crowes; mounting up into the air after them, and will beat them till they make them cry:” which was, perhaps, the king-bird’s half-cousin, as Wilson calls him,—the purple-martin.