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 cry "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 



