Horned Owls in California. 
Los Angeles, Cal., Oct. i. — Editor Forest 
and Stream: In view of all the interesting discus¬ 
sions which have been carried on in Forest and 
Stream about the various forms of the horned 
owl found east of the Mississippi, a few notes 
from the Western rim of the continent, the 
southern end of California, may not be un¬ 
interesting. 
My acquaintance with the Pacific horned 
owl (the form found in California from the 
Tehachepi Mountains to the lower California 
boundary) dates back about fifteen years to 
a time when, instead of being the rare bird 
which it now is, it was almost as plentiful as 
the little burrowing owls which inhabit every 
barley field. 
Misguided enthusiasm on the part of ranch¬ 
ers has been responsible for the disappearance 
of the big owls in the southern counties. 
Where the horned owl kills one chicken, it 
does away with a hundred mice and moles and 
gophers, these latter animals which only some 
night prowler such as the owl can successfully 
combat. 
Records of about fifty nests of the horned 
owls, all found in the neighborhood of ranches 
and in densely populated farming country, give 
chickens in only ten; quail in fifteen; wild 
duck in five, and the rest of the remains, 
bones and pellets, so far as I could distinguish, 
small rodents, with one snake. These records 
extend over a period of five years, and many 
of them are from the same nest, taken year 
after year. 
The Pacific horned owl is smaller than the 
horned owl found in the East and Northeast, 
rarely averaging more than seventeen inches 
in length, while its wing-spread is consider¬ 
ably less than that of a mounted horned owl 
from Wisconsin, the length of which is only 
nineteen inches. The plumage, sometimes gray, 
is usually a rich, umber brown, shading into 
a chrome yellow on the under parts, with 
gray predominating on the inside surface of 
the legs. The female is slightly larger than 
the male, and by far the more aggressive. I 
have had these female owls dash at my head 
like a maddened hawk, but never one struck, 
though they came so close that their great 
brown wings brushed my face. They are par¬ 
ticularly bold when the nests are in those of 
hawks and crows in the tops of tall oaks and 
sycamores, more open to the air than in caves 
or on ledges. 
By far the greater part of the nests of the 
Pacific horned owl, however, are made in 
holes in rocks, in caves along steep sidehills, 
and at the bottoms of drains in the face of 
cliffs; in short, in places frequently where the 
man familiar with the habits of the horned owl 
of the East would never look for them. 
The first nest and eggs of this bird which I 
ever found was located by my sliding over the 
edge of a hidden dirt cliff and practically fall¬ 
ing on top of the sitting female. Two half- 
incubated eggs were in the nest and the male 
bird was perched on a dead stub across a 
narrow canon. As the female tumbled off the 
eggs into midair, the male joined her, and 
both rose, disappearing over the ridge into 
another small branch gulch. As soon as I h d 
collected my wits after the fall of ab6ut four 
feet, I looked at the eggs, bending over to 
do so. 
Scarcely was my back well turned, when out 
of the air in an opposite direction to that 
PACIFIC HORNED OWL. 
In the entrance to its nest in a sycamore tree. 
which the birds had taken came the 
“who-o-o-o-sh” of their wings. Straight down 
they came, flying close together until they 
were possibly fifteen feet from me, when they 
parted, and one rising on each side of my 
head, passed within three or four feet of my 
face without touching me, but keeping up a 
continuous snapping of their beaks. 
This was their last appearance as aggress¬ 
ors, but when I slid the remainder of the dis¬ 
tance down the shale cliff, I saw one of the 
birds, the smaller and darker of the two and 
presumably the male, perched on a boulder 
across the main canon from the branch in which 
the nest was located. 
These birds, though I took this set of eggs, 
laid another set in a hole in a limestone ledge 
about fifty yards up the canon just three 
weeks later. This time the female bird had 
four eggs when I visited the canon again. 
Incubation in the first set showed that the 
clutch was complete; in the second set all the 
eggs were fresh. These I photographed and 
took also. Then the pair returned to the 
basin in the cliff, and the female laid a third 
set, consisting of three eggs. These she 
hatched, and for four seasons thereafter laid 
a set of eggs in one or the other of these 
places. If I remember rightly, in this time, 
however, she laid only one other set of four, 
the remainder of the clutches being of two 
and three eggs. 
When undisturbed, I believe practically all 
the eggs of the Pacific horned owl hatch. I 
have never found any infertile eggs in nests 
which I have examined when the young were 
in them or when the young had just left. If 
this is true, it is a remarkable condition, as I 
have found infertile eggs of almost all the 
other birds with which I have met in southern 
California. 
The period of incubation of this horned 
owl is about four weeks, as is also that of the 
Western red-tailed hawk, the spotted owl and 
other birds of prey of similar size in this part 
of the country. When the young birds 
emerge from the eggs they are covered with 
a white down, which stays longer on them 
than on the young of the screech owl, the 
turkey, vulture, or the young of hawks, which 
latter birds mature much more rapidly than 
do those of any of the owls. 
Rarely, in southern California, is the nest 
of the horned owl made in a hollow tree, 
though I have found a few such nests, mostly 
in sycamores, the prevailing tree of large size 
in the region inhabited by the owls. When 
the nest is in a hollow tree, some rude attempt 
is made at lining it with feathers, rabbit fur, 
etc., as is also the case in the two or three 
instances I have known in which the Pacific 
horned owl occupied the abandoned nests of 
hawks and crows. 
By far the larger number of nests of this 
bird are in little basins in cliffs, on the bare 
sandy floors of small caves, often on a gently 
sloping hillside, and in similar localities. One 
nest I found was in the hollow trunk of a 
fallen oak tree, open to the air at both ends. 
This, however, was in a section of rolling 
hills which had been practically denuded of 
big trees by Mexican woodchoppers and in 
which there were no caves. In the cases of 
nests made in caves and basins on cliffs, I have 
never seen any attempt at nest building, not 
even so much as to line the bowl scooped out 
in the sand by the female with a few feathers. 
The eggs are not round, some of them do not 
even approach roundness; they are larger than 
those of the spotted owl (the Western form 
of the barrel owl of the East), but uniformly 
smaller than those of the horned owl of the 
Eastern States. 
