404 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 
under the focusing cloth. Except for his full-voiced yells and well- 
aimed sticks I am sure my position would have been utterly untenable. 
The last try for pictures, when the young were placed on the old 
stump a few feet to the east of the big elm, did not pass off so smoothly. 
Whether the city friend who had become interested in the proceed- 
ings and who was this time trusted as my bodyguard was less effective 
with voice and missiles than he should have been, or whether the owls 
no longer feared an ordinary demonstration, it would be hard to say. 
Two of the youngsters were already on the oak stump and I was 
somewhere aloft in quest of the third. Presumably I was either just 
reaching over the nest rim for the last snapping owlet or else had just 
started down with him. My memory has never been clear on the point 
nor was my excited friend ever able to elucidate fully. At any rate 
my position for the moment must have been strategically bad. The 
sharp ery ‘‘Look out” barely gave me time to duck my head, when 
a resounding whack was administered across my shoulders. This 
was not damaging, but the return stroke would come quickly and 
doubtless be better placed. It came and I ducked again, but not 
quite far enough, or possibly not at exactly the right instant. The 
shock was profound. The list of damages showed three scalp wounds 
from 1 inch to nearly 3 inches in length, while my cap had disappeared 
entirely from the scene. This was later found under a tree some 
hundred yards to the south, a punctured souvenir of our last intimate 
contact with the great horned owls. 
After each sitting the young were replaced in the nest and two 
days after the stormy last one, on April 24, the house was found 
empty and the family was in the treetops. It will be noted that the 
owlets remained in the nest about two weeks longer in 1907 than in 
1906. One youngster was in the very top branches of the old elm 
of his nativity, fully 50 feet above the deserted home or more than 
70 feet above the ground; another was 100 yards away in the timber 
tract and some 18 feet up in a linden; both were motionless and 
inconspicuous among the budding branches. In the time at disposal 
the third brother could not be found. Two days before this the 
young had shown neither inclination nor ability to fly. It seems 
certain that no one of them could have mounted a vertical distance 
of 50 feet through any powers of his own. The conclusion seems 
inevitable that in some way the old birds carried the young to the 
places where I found them. But the secret belongs to the owls, for 
no one witnessed the leave-taking. | 
A little more than two months passed by and on a walk through 
their now heavily foliaged retreat two great heavy owls, seemingly, 
and doubtless actually, larger than adults, were startled from the 
ground near some prostrate tree trunks, from which they flew slowly 
into the nearby trees. Almost at the same moment a third dropped 
