1909-1910-] The Long-Eared OwL 247 



an owl off an old Magpie nest in C. wood. C. wood lies above 

 the thicket, separated from it by no more than the width of a 

 byroad. The trees are mainly planes and beeches, but there 

 is a sprinkling of Scots firs just sufficient in our estimation, if 

 in nobody's else's, to justify the presence of Owls. Below the 

 trees there is a very stout undergrowth of elder and privet, 

 which does everything which a very stout undergrowth can do 

 to impede the progress and observations of the bird-hunter. 

 The nest was empty ; and the identity of the Owl — at that 

 time the subtle distinctions between a Tawny Owl and a Long- 

 eared Owl in flight were beyond our powers of appreciation — 

 was not established. Three days later the same nest contained 

 one Qg^, and proved to be the possession of a Long-eared 

 Owl. A Long-eared Owl's nest ! — may you and the authorities 

 mark, in a wood that was neither deep, nor dark, nor coni- 

 ferous, except in so far as a sprinkling of firs makes a wood 

 coniferous. That sprinkling of firs saved the situation, from 

 the authorities' standpoint. The nest was in a Scots fir, and 

 ib was easy to argue that if there had been no Scots firs, 

 and no old nests in the Scots firs, there would have been 

 no Long-eared Owls in the wood. On the other hand, we 

 could reason with equal urbanity that as all the suitable old 

 nests in the wood were situated in Scots firs, the Owls had no 

 choice in the matter. If they insisted upon nesting in the 

 wood, they must take a Scots fir nest, or none at all. The 

 situation of the nest proved nothing but the partiality of the 

 Magpies. 



Eemembering the susceptibilities of the E. wood birds in 

 1904, we did not revisit this nest until March 29. On that 

 day we were not greatly surprised to find it deserted and empty. 

 The emptiness might be laid to the account of a Crow or a Mag- 

 pie ; the desertion — to what ? Another aberration ? The Long- 

 eared Owls in this part of the world were all very strangely 

 aberrant. On April 30, in the hope that the same birds 

 might be making a second nesting effort, we hunted C. wood 

 again, and this time succeeded in disturbing a Long-eared Owl 

 from another old Magpie nest in a Scots fir a few yards distant 

 from the nest used on March 19. This nest contained two 

 newly-hatched young and two eggs. A few days later (May 

 5) we visited the nest again, and found both parents, eggs, and 



