1909-1910-] The Long-Eared Owl. 243 



X.—THE LONG-EARED OWL. 



By Mr J. C. ADAM. 



{Communicated, Oct. 26, 1910.) 



I WOULD like to forewarn you that, despite the unqualified 

 title, this is not an exhaustive treatise upon the Long-eared 

 Owl ; it is hardly even what the scientific man loves to call, a 

 " contribution to our knowledge " of the bird. With much 

 more reason it might be called a contribution to our ignor- 

 ance ; and if it assists the interested to realise how very, very 

 ignorant we are of the lives and habits of even the commoner 

 members of our avifauna, so much of its purpose will have 

 been achieved. Otherwise it attempts to relate the progress 

 of our acquaintanceship with the Long-eared Owl in certain 

 West Lothian woods. When my friend Mr S. E. Brock and 

 myself set out to probe the secrets of the Long-eared Owl's 

 life, we undertook a harder task than we knew. We found a 

 bird who behaved neither by rule of bird-book nor by rule of 

 ours (which is quite a different thing), nor by rule of his own, 

 — a bird whose sole object in life might have been to baffle 

 the human seeker after knowledge. The inconsequence and 

 inconclusiveness of two-thirds of our observations would have 

 driven any but a bird-man to despair, and that I have any 

 story to tell is due rather to the pertinacity — the merciless 

 pertinacity — of our inquiries, rather to our magnificent 

 powers of conjecture, than to the amount of straightforward 

 material supplied by the Owl. 



Prior to 1904 we had no personal knowledge of Long-eared 

 Owls in the lowlands of the Lothians. Our experience of 

 the bird, so far as these counties are concerned, had been 

 restricted to the upland firwoods, chiefly those long strips of 

 Scots fir and spruce which intersect and shelter the moorland 

 fields on the edge of the Pentland Hills. So frequently had 

 we met the bird there and so rarely elsewhere, that, with 

 youthful precipitancy, we had come to regard the Long-eared 

 Owl as an upland bird, as much attached to that bleak wind- 

 swept country as the Curlew or the hill Kestrels with whom 



