394 The Wilson Bulletin — No. 92 



covered, which g"o to show that birds of this kind have ex- 

 isted in North America for a great many thousands of years. 



Our United States owls have interested me for nearly half 

 a century, and during all that time I have kept several species 

 of them as pets; have shot specimens for my own and other 

 collections, and photographed from life many of the dif- 

 ferent species. Without referring to any special statistics or 

 censuses with respect to these birds in nature, I am of the 

 opinion that, with the exception of certain places and in the 

 vicinage of large cities, owls are about as numerous elsewhere 

 as they were fifty years ago. This is due to the fact that man 

 does not use them for food ; other animals seldom prey upon 

 them, and the majority of the species are entirely nocturnal 

 in habit. Around cities and towns, however, owls are almost 

 invariably slain when a man or a boy comes across one of 

 them in the open with the means of shooting the bird or 

 otherwise killing it. There are but few exceptions to this 

 rule anywhere in the course of a year, and through such 

 practices altogether too many of these useful birds are, in 

 sheer wantonness, annually destroyed. 



Throughout the world there are thousands of skins and 

 mounted specimens of all kinds of owls in the collections of 

 private individuals, ornithologists, and museums, and these 

 are of great value to science. There are also many skeletons of 

 owls in similar hands and institutions, and the study of these 

 has thrown much light on the general history of birds, in so 

 far as such material can do so. Studies of this character are 

 extremely important, and up to the present time have by no 

 means been exhausted, in so far as owls are concerned. In- 

 deed, several of the structures in the anatomy of these birds 

 are of wonderful interest, as the assymmetry of the skull in 

 some species ; their extraordinary ears ; the osseous platelets 

 of the eyes, and so forth, all of which I have studied many 

 times and described in various publications. 



In this age, however, owls are, as in the case of all oi our 

 birds, looked upon in an entirely different light from what 

 they were fifty years ago. when they were far more numer- 



