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Volume XVII 
5 
CHARACTERISTIC BIRDS OP THE DAKOTA PRATR1ES 
I. IN THE OPEN GRASSLAND 
By FLORENCE MERRIAM BAILEY 
T PIE NORTHERN PACIFIC carried us out across the dead level of the old 
bed of Lake Agassiz and then up over the North Dakota couteau whose gen- 
tle morainal swells were left by the ice sheet. The bigness of the great open 
prairies slowly sinks into your consciousness as hour after hour you look out upon 
grain fields interrupted only at long intervals by a farm house, or a way station 
made conspicuous by tall grain elevators. 
As we looked from the car windows we eagerly scanned the small sloughs, 
enticing little Dakota sloughs, small ponds in saucer-like depressions of the prai- 
rie, around which many of the prairie birds nest; but though we saw ducks sit- 
ting on the water and handsome Yellow-headed Blackbirds and fascinating Black 
Terns flying about, the train passed too rapidly for the recognition of many spe- 
cies. 
Beating low over the fields was one bird whose identity could not be ques- 
tioned, the Short-eared Owl, a characteristic bird of the prairie region. Of the 
anomalous day-hunting owls my experience had been limited to the Burrowing. 
How 1 longed to see flammens! My first sight of one had been the other side of 
the Minnesota line when, on a fence post, a tall bird standing half round shoul- 
deredly peering at us suddenly broke away, flapping off on wide brown wings. 
What bird-lover does not know the thrill of such a moment ! Here was the Short- 
eared at last ! An owl with big round head and slowly flapping wings bound not 
for dense woods but for the big bare prairie; an owl that seems at first blush as 
much of a target as an eagle flying freely about in the day time, making its nest 
and rearing its family safely in the open! Eloquent commentary on the great 
untenanted prairie ! 
A nest of this Flat-faced Owl, as it is called locally, was later reported to me 
on one of the big wheat farms bordering Stump Lake. It was said to be “in the 
