WAYS OF THE OWL. 325 



When wet, the feathers seem to shake themselves as well as to be 

 shaken by motions of the body, head, and wings. My wife, in 

 making a water-color sketch of Snowdon, complained that, al- 

 though she could not see him move, he changed his outline a dozen 

 times in an hour. 



The owl's eye is his most useful member. The popular belief 

 that the owl is seriously blinded by light is almost wholly un- 

 founded, at least so far as the species of which I am writing are 

 concerned. When a man approaches an owl in broad daylight 

 the owl, in nine cases out of ten, will close his eyes, and so appear 

 sleepy. As I have already explained, this is an effort to escape 

 notice by the assumption of a protective shape. That it is not due 

 to any dread of light or inability to see is shown by the following 

 instances of perfect seeing by owls in bright daylight : Walking 

 through a Cambridge road in March, 1891, 1 saw an Acadian owl 

 perched on a willow limb about fifty feet from me. His plumage 

 was stiffened and his eyes nearly shut. I approached him and 

 slowly raised my hand toward him. Suddenly his eyes opened 

 wide and glared at me. Then the soft wings spread and he fell 

 forward upon them, and flew toward the sun to a distant perch. 

 The Acadian owl already mentioned as having been seen in 

 December, 1891, in the spruce forest of the Swift River Valley, 

 watched me keenly, and swung his small head around after the 

 manner of owls, trying to see me clearly from more than one point 

 of view. The screech-owl which I first owned, although sham- 

 ming sleep one morning when I entered the room where I kept it, 

 pounced upon a dead mouse which I let fall upon the floor, and 

 flew off with it before I realized what had happened. One of 

 my three young screech-owls when only two months old tried to 

 catch a sap-sucking woodpecker which had perched near it in the 

 sunlight on a dead tree. My snowy owl, as I have already stated, 

 watches birds flying across the sky at a distance, and once saw me 

 as I slowly emerged from the woods an eighth of a mile from him. 

 Great-horned owls are well known to be active by day, and not 

 inconvenienced by sunlight. The barred owls, however, exhibit 

 the most marvelous powers of sight, and their eyes may well be 

 called telescopic. In dozens of instances Puffy has seen, and by 

 his fixed watching of the sky has called my attention to, hawks 

 flying at so great a height that they were well-nigh beyond man's 

 vision. More than this, he has on two or three occasions seen a 

 hawk approaching in the upper air when my eyes, aided by a 

 fairly strong glass, failed to see the bird until it drew nearer and 

 grew large enough for me to detect it as a mere dot in the field of 

 the lens. My eyes, by the way, are rather stronger and more 

 far-sighted than the average. If the bird thus sighted by Puffy 

 is a hawk or an eagle, he watches it until it is out of sight. If it 



