90 NOTE OF THE OWL. 



Jardine once shot a white owl in the act of hooting ; 

 and Mr. Boulton, of Beverley, Yorkshire, describes * the 

 note of one of these birds which he had reared from 

 the nest, and kept in confinement for fifteen months, 

 as follows : — " It does hoot exactly like the long-eared 

 owl, but not so frequently. I use the term ' hoot ' in 

 contradistinction to ' screech,' which it often does when 

 irritated." 



In Gardiner's " Music of Nature '' the note of the brown 

 owl is thus rendered : — 



m 



t 



*- 



' 



Mr. Colquhoun, to whom allusion has just been made, 

 says, that the music of the white or barn owl is a little 

 different from that of the brown owls. It is only one 

 prolonged cadence, lower and not so mournful as that of 

 the tawny fellow. 



It would appear that owls do not keep to one note. A 

 friend of Gilbert White's remarked that most of his owls 

 hooted in B flat, but that one went almost half a note 

 below A. The pipe by which he tried their notes was a 

 common half-crown pitchpipe. A neighbour, also, of the 

 Selborne naturalist, who was said to have a nice ear, 

 remarked that the owls about Selborne hooted in three 

 different keys : in G flat (or F sharp), in B flat, and A 



* " The Zoologist" for 1863, p. 8,765. 



