116 THE Witson Burtiterin—No. 75: 
the young of that species in his Birds of America, and his de- 
scription of the plumage and its color in the adult is ex- 
tremely vague and unsatisfactory. 
Coues in the Fifth Edition of his Key to North American 
Birds, has nothing to say about the young of any of the Barred 
Owls, at any stage of their development. 
Ridgway in his Manual of North American Birds, under 
the description of the Barred Owl (S. nebulosum) offers us 
one of the plumages of the young of this species, with respect 
to color and character of markings. This description evi- 
dently refers to the young at the time of leaving the nest, 
although the author does not so state. This I take to be so 
from the fact that he says of the “ Young: Head, neck, and 
entire lower parts broadly barred with rather light umber- 
brown and pale buffy and whitish, the brown and lighter bars 
about equal in width.” Now if Figs. 1 and 2 of the present ar- 
ticle are compared, it wi!l be observed that in the nestling the 
markings consist of very irregular lines, and by no means 
definite bars (Fig. 1), while in the young bird-of-the-year, 
the lower parts are marked by broken longitudinal stripes. 
(Fig. 2). Hence, Ridgway’s description, to say the least, is 
rather faulty. As a matter of fact the lower parts in the nest- 
ling are both irregularly “barred and spotted with shades 
of brown,” as I state in my Chapters on the Natural History 
of the United States (1897, p. 240). 
In the work referred to I give a full-page plate of a nest- 
ling of the species, which is a reproduction of a photograph 
from life made by myself. The markings are here beauti- 
fully shown, and these instead of being transverse bars, are, 
in reality, short, irregular, broken lines and, in some in- 
stances, spots. 
So it goes for the most part throughout ornithological liter- 
ature,— the descriptions of the plumages of the nestlings or 
the sub-adult forms of most species of birds have been either 
entirely omitted, or else incorrectly, shiftlessly or insufficiently 
recorded. In nearly all instances, a knowledge of such mat- 
ters is of the greatest importance as shedding light upon the 
