THE GREA T HORNED WL. 89 



THE GREAT HORNED OWL. 



Our four seasons, spring, summer, autumn and winter, are 

 not divided by exact lines. There is no perceptible differ- 

 ence between the last of May and the first of June, nor between 

 the last of August and the first of September; and the melt- 

 ing power of spring is in the air, even in our climate, long 

 before the last of February. The birds do not begin to 

 make their appearance from the south, indeed, until some 

 time in March; yet there is one common resident, which 

 breeds already in February, becoming conscious, perhaps, 

 of the genial influence of the first melting rays of the sun. 

 About the middle of the last-named month a youth brought 

 me a large, living female of the Great Horned Owl (Bubo 

 virginianus), which had been winged while on the nest; and 

 he had also secured the eggs. The nest was a huge pile of 

 sticks, placed very high in a beech tree; the eggs, two in 

 number, some 2.25 x 2.00, were roundish, smooth, and of a 

 dull but clear white. The nest is said to be found some- 

 times in a hollow tree, or even in the cleft of a rock, but 

 generally in a tall pine or hemlock, and to be generally 

 " lined with dry leaves and a few feathers," the eggs being 

 sometimes as many as six. Twenty inches or two feet in 

 length, tawny or whitish, variously mottled with brown 

 and black; with a large, white patch on the throat, large 

 ear-tufts and bright-yellow irides; his is a large, homely 

 form, patched and spotted with the plainest of colors, and 

 having a face like that of a lynx rather than of a bird. Nor are 

 his habits any more agreeable than his personal appearance. 

 Most formidable as to bill and claws, he is a sly, destructive 

 bird of prey, even to the devastation of the poultry-yard. 

 Wilson tells the following amusing anecdote about him: 

 " A very large one, wing broken, * was kept 



a'bout the house for several days, and at length disappeared, 



