GREAT HORNED OWL 309 



feet farther and placed behind a fire-charred stump after the head, 

 the meat of one leg, and most of the viscera had been eaten. Early 

 in the morning of the 24th, the owl returned to its cache, dragged it 

 to a new spot 10 feet distant, and there completed eating the 

 carcass." 



I once had a captive horned owl that I had raised from the nest 

 and kept in my aviary with several other hawks and owls ; in the next 

 cage, separated by a chicken-wire partition, was a pet red-shouldered 

 hawk, of which I was very fond, as it would eat out of my hand; 

 one night the owl broke through the partition, killed and partially 

 devoured my pet hawk; the owl soon paid the penalty of a murderer 

 and is now in my collection. 



In the middle of a bright day in April, while we were hunting for 

 nests of the red-tailed hawk in the woods of Plymouth County, Mass., 

 we saw a pair of these hawks sailing about over a large tract of pitch- 

 pine timber, half a mile or so distant. Half an hour or more elapsed 

 before we began a systematic search for their nest, when only one of 

 the hawks was seen, circling back and forth over the woods and 

 evidently looking for something. We had not gone far into the pines 

 before we saw a great horned owl fly from a small pitch pine ; on closer 

 inspection, we saw a great mass of feathers on a flat branch near the 

 top of the tree; it was apparently the owl's feeding roost, as there 

 were feathers and droppings on the ground beneath. I climbed up 

 to investigate it and was surprised to find the wing of an adult red- 

 tailed hawk which had recently been torn from the body of the 

 victim; the flesh was still fresh and warm. I had no doubt that the 

 owl had just killed one of the hawks that we had seen sailing over the 

 woods less than an hour before. 



At least two other similar cases have been reported. Arthur H. 

 Norton (1928) found even more convincing evidence on a nest of the 

 owl that he was studying in Maine; he says: "On the side of the nest 

 rested the wing of a large bird; this proved to be the wing of a red- 

 tailed hawk which had been eaten by the family; feathers were 

 scattered all about the tree, and a mass of other feathers on a bare 

 ledge about seventy feet east south east from the nest showed the 

 place where the victim had been throttled or partly plucked. The 

 wing proved to have been stripped of flesh; and later the legs were 

 found, one in the nest, the other near the crest of the ridge a hundred 

 or more feet to the north north east from the nest, both with the 

 flesh stripped off." 



The list of miscellaneous food includes snakes, frogs, dace, goldfish, 

 bullheads, eels, perch, crawfishes, Jerusalem crickets, beetles, grass- 

 hoppers, katydids, and scorpions. Mr. Forbush (1927) tells of a man 

 who "came upon a Horned Owl in trouble with a black snake. * * * 

 Plainly the owl had caught the snake, but the reptile had twisted itself 



