1909-1910-] The Long-Eared Owl. 245 



authorities was another matter, and really no concern of 

 ours. 



It was consequently a triumphant day for the authorities, 

 and a sad and solemn day for our bird-hunting prestige, when, 

 on May 4, 1904, we found a nest, containing four eggs, in a 

 West Lothian wood. The authorities triumphed because the 

 wood — which I shall call E. wood hereafter — was situated 

 right in the heart of a rich agricultural district, and twelve or 

 fifteen miles as a man might fly from the nearest upland 

 woods, where we had known them to be. Our prestige was 

 gone, because the wood had been searched many times before 

 and yielded all kinds of ornithological results, but never Long- 

 eared Owls. The triumph of the authorities would probably 

 have been more complete if the wood had been entirely coni- 

 ferous, — it was probably sufficiently coniferous to pass the 

 tests. In any case, the nest — one of those time-worn, 

 crumbling structures of unknown origin which abound in fir 

 woods — was in a coniferous portion of it, a scattered group of 

 old Scots firs which formed the north-western corner, and, to 

 our minds, an ideal habitat for Long-eared Owls. The auth- 

 orities would probably have recommended a dense belt of 

 younger spruce and Scots fir on the southern side of the 

 wood, and it may have been some small crumb of comfort to 

 our humbled spirits that the nest was not there. The extrac- 

 tion of further comfort of this or any other order was ruth- 

 lessly frustrated by the immediate desertion of the nest and 

 the disappearance of the birds, as far as our senses were 

 aware, from the wood. Unless this desertion was in itself 

 some comfort, it was certainly quite unwarranted according to 

 the " regulations " — susceptibility to human disturbance had 

 never been formulated as a characteristic of the Long-eared 

 Owl; but then it was equally unwarranted from our own 

 experience — we had never known a Long-eared Owl take 

 fright in this manner before. We decided it must be an 

 aberration, and left the authorities triumphant. 



This triumph of the authorities, however, appeared likely 

 to prove short-lived, for in the following spring (1905) we 

 could find no sign of Long-eared Owls either in this wood or 

 in any of the neighbouring plantations. They were as empty 

 of Long-eared Owls as they ever had been in the years prior 



VOL. VI. ^ E 



