90 
NOTE OF THE OWL. 
Jardine once shot a white owl in the act of hooting ; 
and Mr. Boulton, of Beverley, Yorkshire, describes * the 
note of one of these birds which he had reared from 
the nest, and kept in confinement for fifteen months, 
as follows :—It does hoot exactly like the long-eared 
owl, but not so frequently. I use the term ‘ hoot ’ in 
contradistinction to ‘ screech,’ which it often does when 
irritated.” 
In Gardiner’s “ Music of Nature ” the note of the brown 
owl is thus rendered :—- 
Mr. Colquhoun, to whom allusion has just been made, 
says, that the music of the white or barn owl is a little 
different from that of the brown owls. It is only one 
prolonged cadence, lower and not so mournful as that of 
the tawny fellow. 
It would appear that owls do not keep to one note. A 
friend of Gilbert White’s remarked that most of his owls 
hooted in B flat, but that one went almost half a note 
below A. The pipe by which he tried their notes was a 
common half-crown pitchpipe. A neighbour, also, of the 
Selborne naturalist, who was said to have a nice ear, 
remarked that the owls about Selborne hooted in three 
different keys : in G flat (or F sharp), in B flat, and A 
‘ The Zoologist” for 1863, p. 8,765. 
