THE SNOWY OWL. 
4'J 
soon tearing through the netting escaped into the outhouse^ 
where he was discovered standing very contentedly upon a heap 
of snow which had drifted through tlie broken door. A few 
days afterwards he made a second escape, and was again found 
standing upon the snow. I would gladly have set him at 
liberty after this, but as he had received an injury in the wing 
in one of his attempts to free himself, and was therefore per- 
manently crippled, I knew that death either by gun or starva- 
tion would be the certain result of such attempted charity, and 
therefore gave him his only chance of life by still retaining 
him as a prisoner. I used often to let him loose among the 
snow, but, singular to say, from the very day on which he 
made the escape above recorded, the wildness and ferocity of 
his nature was revived, and notwithstanding every method I 
could devise in order to win him back, he never afterwards 
made the smallest distinction between strangers and myself. 
As the next wdnter approached, the people of the house, having 
become tired of him, refused him any other shelter than that sup- 
posed to be afforded by an old ruined muddy cow-shed. They 
promised to feed him during my short compulsory absence. 
On my going to visit him at last in December, I found him 
lying dead in the mud, a miserable object, a mere heap of 
feathers and bones, and wdthout a particle of food in the 
stomach. He had been in my possession just eighteen months, 
and most sincerely did I regret the poor bird’s untimely 
end. 
T should have mentioned previously that during the first 
wdnter, not knowing where to obtain a supply of food, and 
having found by experience that he would not touch fresh fish, 
I appealed to Eobert Nicolson, wEo solved my difficulty, as he 
had previously solved his owm, by the simple method of rolling 
the fish among feathers before presenting it. In this disguise 
it w^as never afterwards refused.” 
Before leaving Shetland I read my notes on the Snowy Owl 
to Nicolson, afterw^ards begging him to inform me of any omis- 
sions, as well as of anything he considered remarkable in the 
D 
