202 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



In the days of my boyhood Screech Owls occasionally visited the more 

 thickly settled parts of Cambridge, but I do not think that at that time any bred 

 there. Shortly after the English Sparrows became numerous, however, the 

 Owls began to prey on them, and, finding the novel food abundant and to their 

 liking, took up their permanent abode where it could be most easily and certainly 

 obtained at all seasons — that is, in the heart of our city. For upwards of fifteen 

 years past a cavity high in a large elm that stands on Linnsean Street, opposite 

 the Botanic Garden has been regularly occupied as a nesting site by these Owls ; 

 they have also reared young during this period in an elm near Mr. C. F. Batchel- 

 der's house on Kirkland Street; in June, 1893, a nest containing young was 

 found in the Class Day Elm in the Harvard College Grounds ; and in the sum- 

 mer of 1900 a brood of young, still clothed in their natal down, appeared in the 

 horse chestnuts in front of the old Nichols house, also known as the Lee house, 

 on Brattle Street. 



Even that densely populated part of Boston known as the Back Bay Dis- 

 trict is now occasionally invaded by these daring and adaptive little Owls ; Dr. 

 Arthur P. Chadbourne tells me that he heard one wailing in the trees on Marl- 

 borough Street during the evening of January 31, 1902, and late in December, 

 1903, my assistant, Mr. R. A. Gilbert, saw another which had just been caught 

 on the doorstep of a house on Commonwealth Avenue. 



100. Bubo virginianus (Gmel.). 

 Great Horned Owl. Cat Owl. 



Formerly resident in small numbers ; now an uncommon autumn or winter visitor. 



NESTING DATES. 



February 22 — ■ March i . 



Mr. J. Elliot Cabot, in a vivid description in ' Sedge-birds,' ^ of the dawn of 

 an autumn morning at Fresh Pond in the early 30's, evidently refers to the Great 

 Horned Owl in the following passage : " From the pines behind comes the hoo, 

 hoo-hoo of the owls, like the toot of a distant horn preluding the full blast, 

 and out of the darkness overhead the bark of the Kwa-birds or Night Herons." 

 As the Cabots' shooting stand was in Cambridge Nook, very near where Alewife 

 Brook left the pond, the pines above mentioned may have stood where the 



» J. E. Cabot, Atlantic Monthly, XXIII, 1869, 385. 



