40S SYRNIA FUNEREA. 



tinents, advancing little southward in winter. Dr Richard- 

 son says, " it is a common species throughout the fur countries 

 from Hudson's Bay to the Pacific, and is more frequently killed 

 than any other by the hunters, — which may be partly attri- 

 buted to its boldness and its habit of flying about by day. In 

 the summer season it feeds principally on mice and insects; 

 but in the snow-clad regions which it frequents in the winter, 

 neither of these are to be procured, and it then preys mostly 

 on Ptarmigan. It is a constant attendant on the flocks of 

 Ptarmigan in their spring migrations to the northward. It 

 builds its nest on a tree, of sticks, grass, and feathers, and lays 

 two white eggs. When the hunters are shooting grouse, this 

 bird is occasionally attracted by the report of the gun, and is 

 often bold enough, on a bird being killed, to pounce down upon 

 it, though it may be unable from its size to carry it off." 



M. Temminck states that it sometimes appears as a bird of 

 passage in Germany, and more rarely in France, but never in 

 the southern provinces. Whether the solitary individual met 

 with off" the southern coast of England, came from America or 

 the Euro^oean continent, or was a tame bird that had escaped, 

 can only be conjectured. It was captured, in March 1830, in 

 an exhausted state, on board a collier ; and an account of this 

 occurrence was presented to the Zoological Society, in 1835, by 

 Mr Thompson of Belfast. 



Remarks. — My account of the digestive organs of a male of 

 this species, with figures, will be seen in the fourth volume of 

 Mr Audubon"'s Ornithological Biography. They differ in no 

 essential respect from those of the other owls ; the oesophagus 

 four inches and three-fourths in length, and from ten to eleven 

 twelfths in width ; the stomach an inch and five twelfths long, 

 an inch and a twelfth and a half in breadth, its epithelium 

 very soft and rugous ; the intestine eighteen inches long, from 

 four twelfths to a twelfth and a half in width ; the rectum two 

 inches long ; the coeca two inches and a quarter in length ; 

 and the globular cloaca ten twelfths in diameter. 



