56 



OKNITHOLOGIST 



[Vol. 12-No. 4 



THE 



ORNITHOLOGIST 



AND 



OOLOGIST. 



A MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF 



NATURAL HISTORY, 



ESPECIALLY DEVOTED TO THE STUDY OF 



BII^DD S 3 



THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 



DESIONED AS A MEANS FOR THE INTERCHANGE OF NOTES AND 

 OBSERVATIONS ON BIRD AND INSECT LIFK. 



F. H. CARPENTER, Managing Editor. 



KEHOBOTH, MASS. 



J. PAKKER NOKKIS, Oologieal Editor, 

 '204 South Seventh Street, Philadelphia, Penn. 



FRANK B. WEBSTER, Publisher. 

 409 Washington St., Boston, Mass. 



Nesting of the Saw W^het Owl. 



BY EGBERT BAGG, UTICA, N. Y. 



Kegarding the breeding of the Saw Whet 

 Owl, {Nyrtale acadica) but little has been re- 

 corded. Up to the time of Baird, Brewer and 

 liidgway's great work, the nest of j'Oiing birds 

 found by Audubon near Natchez, and that with 

 eggs, (of which a single specimen was preserv- 

 ed in the Smithsonian Institution,) taken by 

 Mr. R. Christ, at Nazareth, Pa., seem to have 

 been all the recorded nests. Since then Mr. W. 

 Perham, of Tyngsboro, Mass., has examined 

 no less than seven nests, mostly in artificially 

 arranged hollows put up for the purpose of 

 attracting the owls, from only one of which he 

 seems to have secured a set of eggs, that belong- 

 ing to Mr. Wm. Brewster. From some of the 

 others he took young birds, one of which while 

 in the possession of Mr. Brewster, laid a single 

 egg, not fully developed. Mr. N. A. Francis, 

 of Brook) ine, Mass., records a nest with young 

 birds in an old Heron's nest, which is probably 

 a most unusual location ; and finally, Mr. F. H. 

 Carpenter found a nest of young birds at the 

 base of Mt. Kathadin, Maine. 



To these few records I have the pleasure of 

 adding four more, and to these five eggs, two 

 sets of seven each ; and I can hardly doubt that 

 the particulars of the successful search of the 

 Spring of 1886 will be interesting to the readers 

 of The Ornithologist and Oologist. 



Dr. AVm. L. Ralph and the writer have for 

 several years had an alliance offensive and de- 

 seusive in collecting eggs and birds of our 

 neighborhood, and when, during the seasons of 

 1884 and 1885, the Doctor, who was working at 

 that time from Holland Patent, about twelve 

 miles north of Utica, on the R. W. & O. R. R., 

 found that these little owls were comparatively 

 common in that locality, we determined to make 

 a strong effort to find their nests; and to that 

 end employed a man by the day to patrol the 

 woods and swamps from the first of March, for 

 that particular puri)ose. 



As Dr. Ralph was in the South at the time, 

 the matter was left in mj- hands, and I had the 

 pleasure and honor of collecting the first full, 

 normal set of eggs of this bird. On the 27th of 

 March, 1886, I received a postal card fi-om our 

 man, stating that he had found a Great-Horaed 

 Owl's nest, {Bubo viryinianus)^ and I went to 

 Holland Patent to collect the eggs. During the 

 trip the man told me that he had found seven 

 places where the Saw Whets were spending 

 their time; and that on the 12th of March he 

 had found one of these owls in a hole, and had 

 no doubt that she would build there; but that 

 he had visited her on the 25th of March, and 

 that although the bird was still there, he found 

 no signs of nesting. On the 6th of April he 

 wrote me that he had called on her again on the 

 day before, (April 5th) and that there were six 

 eggs in the nest. On April 7th I was at Hol- 

 land Patent, and although it was about as disa- 

 greeable a trip, as I'egards weather, as I ever 

 made, rubber boots kept the mud and water 

 from my feet, and a rubber coat the rain from 

 my back. It was a hard tramp through the 

 mud and rain, loaded with gun, climbing ii-ons, 

 ropes, etc., but at last we reached oui- destina- 

 tion, and found, in high and diy woods of hard 

 wood timber, with a few hemlocks scattered 

 among them, and about five rods from the open 

 field, a dead maple stub, and in it at a height of 

 tweiitj'-two feet from the ground, a deserted 

 woodpecker's hole. (This hole had been de- 

 serted by its original occupants for at least two 

 seasons, for in 1885 it contained a nest of flying 

 squirrels). 



It took several hard blows upon the stub to 

 produce any effect; but suddenly, like a trans- 

 formation scene in a play, the hole at which I 

 was gazing disappeared, and in its place was 

 the flat face of a little owl, fiistened against the 

 side of the stub. That was exactly the eff'ect 

 produced, as the hole was perfectly round, two 

 inches in diameter, and the bird's face exactly 

 filled it. There she sat and no amount of 



