Nesting of the Saw Whet Owl. 
BY EGBERT BAGG, TJTICA, N. Y. 
Regarding the breeding of the Saw Whet 
Owl, ( Nyctale acadica ) but little has been re- 
corded. 'Up to tile time of Baird, Brewer and 
Ridgway's great work, the nest of young birds 
found by Audubon near Natchez, and that with 
eggs, (of which a single specimen was preserv- 
ed in the Smithsonian Institution,) taken by 
Mr. R. Christ, at Nazareth, Pa., seem to have 
been all the recorded nests. Since then Mr. W. 
Perham, of Tyngsboro, Mass., has examined 
no less than seven nests, mostly in artificially 
arranged hollows put up for the purpose of 
attracting the owls, from only one of which he 
seems to have secured a set of eggs, that belong- 
ing to Mr. Wm. Brewster. From some of the 
others he took young birds, one of which while 
in the possession of Mr. Brewster, laid a single 
egg, not fully developed. Mr. N. A. Francis, 
of Brookline, Mass., records a nest with young 
birds in an old Heron’s nest, which is probably 
a most unusual location ; and finally, Mr. F. H. 
Carpenter found a nest of young birds at the 
base of Mt. Kathadin, Maine. 
To these few records I have the pleasure of 
adding four more, and to these five eggs, two 
sets of seven each ; and I can hardly doubt that 
the particulars of the successful search of the 
Spring of 1886 will be interesting to the readers 
of The Ornithologist and Oologist. 
Dr. Wm. L. Ralph and the writer have for 
several years had an alliance offensive and de- 
sensive in collecting eggs and birds of out- 
neighborhood, and when, during the seasons of 
1884 and 1885, the Doctor, who was working at 
that time from Holland Patent, about twelve 
miles north of Utica, on the R. W. & O. R. R., 
found that these little owls were comparatively 
common in that locality, we determined to make 
a strong effort to find their nests; and to that 
end employed a man by the day to patrol the 
woods and swamps from the first of March, for 
that particular purpose. 
As Dr. Ralph was in the South at the time, 
the matter was left in my hands, and I had the 
pleasure and honor of collecting the first full, 
normal set of eggs of this bird. On the 27th of 
March, 1886, I received a postal card from our 
man, stating that he had found a Great-Horned 
Owl’s nest, ( Bubo virginianus) , and I went to 
Holland Patent to collect the eggs. During the 
trip the man told me that he had found seven 
places where the Saw Whets were spending 
their time ; and that on the 12th of March he 
had found one of these owls in a hole, and had 
no doubt that she would build there; but that 
he had visited her on the 25th of March, and 
that although the bird was still there, he found 
no signs of nesting. On the 6th of April he 
wrote me that he had called on her again on the 
day before, (April 5th) and that there were six 
eggs in the nest. On April 7th I was at Hol- 
land Patent, and although it was about as disa- 
greeable a trip, as regards weather, as I ever 
made, rubber boots kept the mud and water 
from my feet, and a rubber coat the rain from 
my back. It was a hard tramp through the 
mud and rain, loaded with gun, climbing irons, 
ropes, etc., but at last we reached our destina- 
tion, and found, in high and dry woods of hard 
wood timber, with a few hemlocks scattered 
among them, and about five rods from the open 
field, a dead maple stub, and in it at a height of 
twenty-two feet from the ground, a deserted 
woodpecker’s hole. (This hole had been de- 
serted by its original occupants for at least two 
seasons, for in 1885 it contained a nest of flying 
squirrels) . 
It took several hard blows upon the stub to 
produce any effect; but suddenly, like a trans- 
formation scene in a play, the hole at which I 
was gazing disappeared, and in its place was 
the flat face of a little owl, fastened against the 
side of the stub. That was exactly the effect 
produced, as the hole was perfectly round, two 
inches in diameter, and the bird’s face exactly 
filled it. There she sat and no amount of 
pounding upon the stub produced any further 
effect, except to make her roll her eyes. My 
companion therefore fastened on the irons and 
began to climb the stub, which shook and 
swayed with his weight, but still the bird did 
not move until his face was almost on a level 
with her's ; when several threatening motions 
of his hand at last induced her to 11 y out and 
alight on the nearest perch, the horizontal limb 
of a small hemlock, about a rod from the nest. 
There she sat, perfectly immovable during the 
three-quarters of an hour that we spent in ex- 
amining the nest, and immediately after my 
companion descended to the ground, she flew 
back into the hole. 
I must not forget to mention one curious fact. 
When the bird’s face first appeared at the hole, 
I exclaimed : “ Why! it is a young bird.” The 
dark face and the white eyebrows were very 
marked, but immediately upon her alighting 
upon the branch, in the full light, this entirely 
disappeared, and her face was the ordinary face 
of an old bird. Exactly the same effect was 
noticed with one of the others mentioned fur- 
ther on. 
We found the hole to be a foot deep and eight 
inches in diameter at the bottom. There was no 
nest except the rotten chips left by the wood- 
peckers and a few of the owl’s feathers — prob- 
ably accidental. There were seven eggs, pure, 
dead white, without gloss or polish. They 
were nearly the same size at each end, and 
about “oval” in shape, according to Plate xvi., 
figure 11 of Ridgway’s Nomenclature of Colors 
and Ornithologist’s Compendium. They meas- 
ure as follows: 1.18x.95; 1.13x.96; 1.19x.96; 
1.18 x .97 ; 1.16x.98; 1.14x.99 and 1.17x1.00. 
They were variously advanced in incubation, 
though none of them were very much incu- 
bated, showing that the bird had been sitting 
since she began to lay. The consistency of the 
albumen was particularly viscid, and the yolk 
small and light colored. 
The other nests were so exactly similar to 
this one that a short descripion of them is all 
that is necessary. 
The second nest was also found near Holland 
Patent, on April 21st, 1886, in a woodpecker's 
hole, in a dead stub, forty feet from the ground, 
and contained five young birds and one egg, 
which was just on the point of hatching. 
The third nest was taken the same day, near 
the Trenton Falls of the West Canada Creek, in 
a woodpecker's hole in a stub, twenty feet from 
the ground. The hole was nine inches deep and 
nine inches in diameter at the bottom ; and was 
lined either purposely or accidentally with a 
few feathers, dry birch leaves, and chips left 
by the original architects. It contained seven 
eggs, exactly similar to the first set, and meas- 
uring as follows ; 1.18x.97; 1.18x.98; 1.24 x 
.98; 1.24 x. 98; 1.25 x. 98; 1. 21 x. 99 and 1.23 x 
1 . 00 . 
The fourth nest was found April 30th, 1886, 
about one mile north of Gang Mills, Herkimer 
County, in a deserted woodpecker’s hole, in a 
stub, fifty feet from the ground, in a heavy 
swamp ; and contained seven eggs within a day 
of hatching. 
From this very successful Spring's work, it 
seems that we are either particularly fortunate 
in our location for studying the nesting of this 
bird, or what is more likely, that the nests have 
not been more often found simply because they 
have not been systematically and diligently 
sought for. 
With the data furnished in this article I have 
no doubt some of the readers of The Orni- 
thologist and Oologist, if willing to do the 
hard and disagreeable work of searching the 
swamps in March and April, will be able to add 
to the records of the Saw Whet. 
i lr€ 
Oneida County, New York, 
William L, Ralph. & Elgbert Bagg 
Nyctala acadica. — Our fifth nest of this species was taken near Holland 
Patent April 30, 1889, from a hollow 65 feet from the ground in the dead 
limb of a living tree. The clutch (which was probably not completed) 
consisted of four fresh eggs 
Auk, VII. July, 1890, V'J.3/- '23 
