205 



While on the pampas I did not observe these birds taking prey 

 during the daytime, but at sunset the bizcachas and owls leave 

 their holes and search for food, the young of the former playing 

 about the birds, as they alighted near them. They do not asso- 

 ciate in companies, there being but one pair to each hole, and 

 at night do not stray far from their homes. 



In speaking of the North American burrowing owl, a writer 

 says that the species suddenly disappears in the early part of 

 August, and also that it is strictly diurnal. The Athene cunicn- 

 laria has not these habits ; it does not disappear during any part 

 of the year, and it is both diurnal and nocturnal, for though I 

 did not observe it preying by day on the pampas, I noticed that 

 it fed at all hours of the day and night on the north shore of the 

 Plata, in the Banda Oriental. 



At long. 66 degs. west, our caravan struck the great saline 

 desert that stretches to the Andes, and during fourteen days' 

 travel on foot, I did not see a dozen of these birds. While resid- 

 inff outside the town of San Juan, at the eastern base of the 

 Andes, I had an opportunity to watch their habits in a locality 

 differing materially from the pampas. 



The months of September and October are the conjugal ones, 

 and during the middle of the former month I obtained a male 

 bird with a broken wing. It lived in confinement two days, 

 refusing to eat, and died from the effects of the wound. A few 

 days later a boy brought me a female owl, with five eggs, that had 

 been taken from her nest, five feet from the mouth of a burrow 

 that wound among the roots of a tree. The female bird was 

 fierce in her cage, and fought with her wings and beak, uttering 

 all the while a shrill prolonged note, resembling the sound pro- 

 duced by drawing a file across the teeth of a saw. I supplied 

 her with eleven full-grown mice, which were devoured during 

 the first thirty-six hours of confinement. 



My object was to discover if this bird burrowed its own habita- 

 tion, and my observations of eight months failed to imj^ress me 

 with that belief. I have conversed with intelligent persons who 

 have been famihar with their habits, and never did I meet one that 

 beheved this bird to be its own workman. It places a small nest 

 of feathers at the end of some deserted or inhabited burrow, as 

 necessity demands, in which are deposited from two to five white 



