BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



203 



Glacialis was afterwards dug by the Tudor Ice Company ; but they are more 

 likely to have been the same noble old trees which for nearly forty years later 

 shaded some six or eight acres of level, swampy land several hundred yards fur- 

 ther to the westward and immediately about Pout Pond. On the occasion of my 

 first visit to this primitive bit of wilderness, so often referred to in the present 

 Memoir under the name of the Pine Swamp, an Owl of the largest size followed 

 me about, circling above and around me but always just out of gun-shot, occa- 

 sionally alighting for a moment, and repeatedly uttering a short, barking note 

 which I have since learned is a characteristic cry of the Great Horned Owl 

 when its breeding haunts are invaded. There can be little doubt that the bird 

 just mentioned had young, for it was seen on June 3, 1865. 



Some time in July or August, 1861, I shot a young Great Horned Owl 

 within two or three hundred yards of our house, in Cambridge. It was perched 

 in a thorny acacia tree on the old Nichols place, near the corner of Appleton and 

 Brattle Streets. Numbers of excited Robins, Bluebirds, Orioles, etc., had gath- 

 ered about it to scold and vociferate. The specimen is still in my possession; 

 it is in the downy natal plumage, but its wing quills and tail-feathers are fully 

 developed. Although this bird was, no doubt, quite able to fly, it had probably 

 come from no great distance, and perhaps from the Pine Swamp. 



I have also the skin of an adult male which I killed on May 13, 1872, in the 

 extensive oak and pine woods between Belmont and Waverley, now included in the 

 grounds of the McLean Asylum. 



In 1874, and again in 1875, Mr. M. Abbott Frazar found a pair of Great 

 Horned Owls nesting in a pine swamp on the borders of Lincoln about half a 

 mile beyond what is now the Hobbs Brook Reservoir. 



The instances just mentioned are all that I can give of the local occurrence 

 of the Great Horned Owl in the breeding season. In late autumn and winter 

 I used to meet with a few birds nearly every year in the more remote parts of 

 Arhngton, Belmont and Waltham. On December 11, 1875, I started one in 

 pine woods lying just to the westward of Mount Auburn. 



101. Bubo virginianus subarcticus (Hoy). 

 Arctic Horned Owl. 



Casual winter visitor. 



Mr. Albert P. Morse, writing of the Great Horned Owl in his ' Birds of 

 Wellesley and Vicinity,' says : " Dr. Faxon reports a very light-colored speci- 



