64 A Pair of Long- Eared Owls. [Sess. 



behaviour ; and then imagine him trying to build out of this 

 hard-won material some coherent conception of the life-cycle 

 of a civilised human, and you will have an inkling — if no 

 more — of our relations to the Owls, the scope of our obser- 

 vations, the probable adequacy and accuracy of our evidence, 

 the probable truth of our theories. On the whole, I think, 

 our fanciful student of man would have the easier task. He 

 would be dealing with a creature of confirmed habit, and 

 there would be plenty of evidence, for instance, which of the 

 adult members of the house was the male and which the 

 female. He could be fairly certain, one would think, that 

 Homo sapiens var. Britannicus was monogamous, and that he 

 frequently occupied the same domicile for several years. We 

 devoted ourselves to the same wood for two successive years, 

 but we cannot be certain that the pair of Long-eared Owls 

 which inhabited the wood in 1910 were identical with the 

 pair which inhabited it in 1911, and yet that is the pre- 

 sumption upon which this study is based, upon which it 

 largely depends for its coherence and interest. How far it 

 is justified will be the burden of what follows, but some 

 preliminary considerations may assist you to understand our 

 point of view. 



The mere fact that the Owls occupied the same wood in 

 both years is not, despite ornithological practice, sufficient 

 evidence that they were the same birds. To our mind it is 

 quite as much evidence that they were different pairs, and 

 proves nothing but the eminent suitability of the wood for 

 Long-eared Owls. Successive occupation of the same nesting 

 haunt by a pair of the same species is a common phenomenon 

 in bird -life. There are woods, for example, which hold 

 Sparrow-hawks year after year ; there are cliffs which have 

 been used by Peregrine Falcons for generations. Most orni- 

 thologists have ascribed such phenomena to hereditary attach- 

 ment, assuming that successive occupants are descendants 

 upon either the paternal or maternal side of some original 

 pair of tenants — members of a long line of blood relations, 

 comprising a kind of dynasty stretching back maybe for 

 centuries, as in the famous case of Peregrines on a Connemara 

 cliff which is believed to have been occupied more or less 

 continuously since 1684. But hereditary attachment will 



