° 1911 J Taverner and Swales, Migration of the Saw-whet Owl. 331 



covered but a small portion of the affected territory and did not 

 touch upon its worst part, he counted 1845 dead birds in two miles 

 of shore. Here was evidently a disaster that overcame a large 

 movement of mixed migrants but the salient fact in this connection 

 is, that he counted 24 Saw-whet Owls among the debris. Mr. 

 Saunders is, and has been for the last twenty-five years, a most 

 keen and enthusiastic field worker, but in summing up his experi- 

 ence with the species, says: "The Saw-whets were a surprise. 

 They are rare in western Ontario, and one sees them only at 

 intervals of many years, evidently they were migrating in con- 

 siderable numbers." 



A statement elicited from the captain of the fish boat ' Louise ' 

 of Sandusky, Ohio, bears very closely upon this subject. He 

 says, that about October 10, 1903, when on the steamer ' Helena,' 

 off Little Duck Islands, Lake Huron, he saw a large migration of 

 small owls and that many of them lit on the steamer. His de- 

 scription tallied very well with that of this species and there is 

 the probability that it was a relay of this same migration that was 

 so hardly used in 1906. 



We were unable to include this species in our List of the ' Birds 

 of Point Pelee,' l having at the time of publication (1906-07) no 

 satisfactory record of its occurrence there, though we had often 

 looked for it. In an adjacent and quite comparable station, Long 

 Point, on Lake Erie and sixty miles to the east, we had heard 

 that Saw-whets were at times captured in numbers by stretching 

 old gill nets across the roads in the woods. The birds flying down 

 the clear lanes became entangled in the meshes and thus caught. 

 This was received from what seemed good authority and backed 

 by so many specimens that we had decided to use the expedient 

 in discovering the presence of the species on the Point. However, 

 October 30, 1908, Swales, while working the Red Cedar (Juniper 

 Virginian a) thickets near the outer end of the Point discovered the 

 fresh remains of two birds of this species. Later the same day 

 Saunders found another in the same condition, and November 22 

 he found two fresh and several older remains. At the time, 

 seeing the great devastation wrought to bird life by the Cooper 



1 Taverner and Swales. The Birds of Point Pelee. Ontario, Wilson Bulletin. 

 1907-1908. 



