86 BRITISH BIRDS, WITH THEIR NESTS AND EGGS. 
quite certain it was S. Budo. Satisfied on this point, we only had to walk a few 
paces along a ledge before the family group was in sight—two blind little puffs 
covered with down just tinged with yellow, and an egg with the prisoner inside 
uttering his series of four or five chirps through the window he had made in the 
shell, with a voice scarcely more feeble than that of his elder brothers. There 
did not seem to be much difference in the ages of the three; they were lying 
upon a small quantity of compressed fur, principally of rats, the remains of the 
castings of the parent birds, their bed nearly flat, for there was not more than 
two inches of soil. Uva-ursi and several other plants grew near; and a small 
Scotch fir-tree had its trunk curiously flattened to the perpendicular rock at the 
back; the ledge was not more than two feet wide, and terminated abruptly just 
beyond the nest; the rock beneath was also perpendicular. We waited at the 
nest a long time in the hope that the parent birds would show themselves; but 
it was not till we had left it that we saw them again sitting on the topmost 
shoots of spruce firs with their ears finely relieved against the sky; and as we 
were nearly in the village again they hooted with a troubled note.” The eggs 
are usually two in number, sometimes three, but never more; they are very large, 
slightly oval, and of a creamy white, and measure from 2°48 to 2°18 inches, by 
from 2 to 1°84 inches. 
The Eagle Owl is a very bold and savage bird, of powerful but noiseless 
flight, is afraid of nothing, and there is hardly any bird that is too large for it 
to. fly at. It will not hesitate to attack an Eagle; and will knock down and 
make a meal off the Capercailzie. In Epirus Lord Lilford was convinced that the 
Eagle Owls preyed chiefly during the autumn and winter upon wild-fowl, which 
they seized as they were feeding on the open marshy lands by night. Although 
largely preying upon hares, rabbits, and the larger feathered game, the Eagle Owl 
does not disdain the smaller favourite items of an Owl’s ménu, such as rats, mice, 
and beetles. It does well in captivity, freely nesting and rearing its young, and 
“if not over-fed, and allowed to take a sun-bath when so inclined,” will live to a 
great age. In the aviaries at Lilford there was an Eagle Owl that was known 
to be at least seventy years old. In confinement it seems to have a noble in- 
difference to its surroundings; when Swaysland, the well-known bird-stuffer of 
Brighton, had his collection of tame Owls in a lower gallery of the West Pier, the 
writer saw a couple of Eagle Owls sitting on their eggs in rough square boxes, 
as placid as domestic hens in a fowl house, in spite of the presence and passing 
of constant visitors. Although the Eagle Owl is a well-known bird owing to its 
being always included in the collections of Zoological Gardens where it may be 
seen sleeping in its cage with its ears erect, or else solemnly awake, and constantly 
