584 HABITS OF THE BURROWING OWL. 
mophiles lived. One or two owls would occasionally be 
seen among a colony of Spermophiles, but they «never ap- 
peared to live in the same hole or burrow with the squirrel ; 
and I have never seen a squirrel enter a burrow that was 
occupied by owls, however much tempted by fear he might 
be to enter the first hole he should come to. True, the Sper- 
mophile never likes to enter any burrow but his own, and 
will run past any number of inviting entrances in order that 
he may at last hide himself in his own domicile. But aside 
from this, I believe that the squirrels are afraid of the owls, 
and do not dare to intrude upon them. The notion that the 
Athene digs its own burrow appears to me apocryphal and 
unreasonable. I have never seen any evidence of it. Nega- 
tive evidence proves nothing; but yet the absence of facts is 
strong presumption against their existence, and it would be 
strange that I should never have seen any evidences of their 
digging powers if they have any. After a shower of rain, 
one sees fresh earth thrown out around the mouths of the 
burrows of the Spermophiles, but never anything of the kind 
around the burrows of the owls. . They are not constituted 
for digging, and there is no necessity for it; they can always 
find any number of holes ready-made for them. That. they 
live in peace and amity with the rattlesnake, I believe to 
be another error and stretch of the imagination. Rattle- 
snakes are very abundant where I lived, and I killed one 
or two almost every time that I rode a mile or more from 
the house, yet I never saw a rattlesnake near a squirrel’s 
hole but once, and that hole was a deserted one. I seg 
found a large rattlesnake swallowing a squirrel (Spermophi- 
lus Beechey?) that it had caught, in the centre of a colony pi 
squirrels, but several yards distant from any “squirrel-hole. 
I once took pains to dig out a nest of the Athene cunicu- 
laria. I found that the burrow was about four feet long, 
and the nest was only about two feet from the surface of the 
ground. The nest was made in a cavity in the ground, of 
about a foot in diameter, well filled in with dry soft horse- 
