68 Wilderness Ways. 



camping near and are new to the woods, the chances 

 are that you lie awake and shiver; for there is no 

 other sound like it in the wilderness. Sometimes, 

 when you- climb to his nest, he has a terrifying hoo-hoo- 

 hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, running up and down a deep guttural 

 scale, like a fiendish laugh, accompanied by a vicious 

 snapping of the beak. And if you are a small boy, 

 and it is towards twilight, you climb down the tree 

 quick and let his nest alone. But the regular whooo- 

 hoo-hoo, whooo-hoo, al ways : five notes, with the second 

 two very short, is a hunting call, and he uses it to 

 alarm the game. That is queer hunting ; but his 

 ears account for it. 



If you separate the feathers on Kookooskoos' head, 

 you will find an enormous ear-opening running from 

 above his eye halfway round his face. And the ear 

 within is so marvelously sensitive that it can hear the 

 rustle of a rat in the grass, or the scrape of a spar- 

 row's toes on a branch fifty feet away. So he sits on 

 his watch tower, so still that he is never noticed, and 

 as twilight comes on, when he can see best, he hoots 

 suddenly and listens. The sound has a muffled 

 quality which makes it hard to locate, and it fright- 

 ens every bird and small animal within hearing; for 

 all know Kookooskoos, and how fierce he is. As the 

 terrifying sound rolls out of the air so near them, fur 



