Extracts from Diary of Otto Widmann 35 



tenance in pastures and farmyards or follow roads into 

 towns in quest of a favorite bird food, horse droppings. 

 With the replacement of horses by the auto this supply 

 has greatly diminished, a circumstance which our House 

 Sparrows have especial reason to deplore. 



The Larks, though having a general resemblance to 

 many members of the Sparrow family, have anatomical 

 characters that separate them into a family of their own. 

 It has its center of distribution in the Old World, where 

 about one hundred species are recognized, among them 

 the celebrated Sky Lark, while America has only one 

 species, but this is so well scattered over the whole con- 

 tinent that the last edition of the A. O. U. Check List 

 enumerates fourteen subspecies. While the song of the 

 Horned Lark cannot be compared to that of the Sky 

 Lark, it still has some merit, and is so much more inter- 

 esting because given by the bird while on wing high in air. 



Wlien speaking of the birds of a circumpolar distribu- 

 tion, we must not forget to mention the Snowy Owl. 

 Everybody has seen mounted specimens of it, for it is a 

 favorite object of the curio shops, especially those at 

 Niagara, a region in which the bird sometimes appears 

 in largo flights. Old males are nearly pure white, younger 

 birds and females are more or less barred by transverse 

 spots of brownish. In its summer home the Snow>' Owl 

 lives mostly on lemmings, and it is not every winter that 

 it leaves its boreal home, but in some years large flights 

 have reached the United States, when as many as 500 

 have been reported from New England alone. Excep- 

 tional wanderings have carried some of them into central 

 and even southern states to South Carolina and Louis- 

 iana, and flights have been observed far out at sea. The 

 species is more diurnal than nocturnal, and when away 

 from home takes what food can be obtained, chiefly mam- 

 mals, but also birds, fish and even offal. The breeding 

 range extends from the limit of trees north to the Arctic 

 Ocean. The flesh of the bird is said to resemble that of 



