176 NOTES ON NEW ENGLAND BIEDS 



but there were four nearly round dirty brownish white ! 

 eggs, quite warm, on nothing but the bits of rotten wood 

 which made the bottom of the hole. The eggs were very 

 nearly as large at one end as the other, slightly oblong, 

 1| inches by 1|, as nearly as I could measure. I took out 

 one. It would probably have hatched within a week, the 

 young being considerably feathered and the bill remark- 

 ably developed. Perhaps she heard me coming, and so 

 left the nest. My bird corresponds in color, as far as 

 I saw it, with Wilson's Strix asio, but not his ncevia, 

 which Nuttall and others consider ayoung(?) bird, 2 

 though the egg was not pure white. I do not remember 

 that my bird was barred or mottled at all. 



May 12, 1855. As I approached the owl's nest, I saw 

 her run past the hole up into that part of the hollow 

 above it, and probably she was there when I thought she 

 had 'flown on the 7th. I looked in, and at first did not 

 know what I saw. One of the three remaining eggs was 

 hatched, and a little downy white young one, two or 

 three times as long as an egg, lay helpless between the 



' MacGillivray describes no eggs of this color, — only white, — and 

 the same with Nuttall, except the great gray owl. [Screech owl's eggs, 

 when clean, are always white and the same is true of all our owls, includ- 

 ing the great gray owl.] 



2 [The dichromatism of the screech owl gave our early ornitholo- 

 gists much trouble. The red phase was described as Strix asio, and 

 the gray, or mottled, phase was given the name of Strix ncevia. Wilson 

 believed the two to be separate species, but Nuttall, in his first edition, 

 called the red the young of the mottled owl (not the other way round, 

 as Thoreau has it). In the edition of 1840, however, Nuttall makes two 

 species of the screech owl, as Wilson had done before him, and it was 

 left to later workers to discover that the two forms were only color 

 phases of a single species, which is now known to science as Otus asio.] 



