As I paddle under the Hemlock bank this cloudy afternoon, about 3 o’clock, I see a screech owl sitting on the edge of a hollow hemlock stump about three feet high, at the base of a large hemlock.
It sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off.
When it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris. You see two whitish triangular lines above the eyes meeting at the bill, with a sharp reddish-brown triangle between and a narrow curved line of black under each eye.
At this distance and in this light, you see only a black spot where the eye is, and the question is whether the eyes are open or not.
It sits on the lee side of the tree this raw and windy day. You would say that this was a bird without a neck. Its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, excepting the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back.
After watching it ten minutes from the boat, I land two rods above, and, stealing quietly up behind the hemlock, though from the windward, I look carefully around it, and, to my surprise, see the owl still sitting there.
So I spring round quickly, with my arm outstretched, and catch it in my hand.
It is so surprised that it offers no resistance at first, only glares at me in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers. But ere long it begins to snap its bill, making quite a noise, and, as I roll it up in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket, it bites my finger slightly.
I soon take it out of my pocket and, tying the handkerchief, leave it on the bottom of the boat. So I carry it home and made a small cage in which to keep it, for a night.
General color of the owl a rather pale and perhaps slightly reddish brown, the feathers centred with black. Perches with two claws above and two below the perch. It is a slight body, covered with a mass of soft and light-lying feathers. Its head muffled in a great hood. It must be quite comfortable in winter.
Dropped a pellet of fur and bones in his cage. He sat, not really moping but trying to sleep, in a corner of his box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. Ordinarily stood rather than sat on his perch.
I never once caught him with his eyes shut.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 28, 1855
It sits with its head drawn in, eying me, with its eyes partly open, about twenty feet off.
When it hears me move, it turns its head toward me, perhaps one eye only open, with its great glaring golden iris. You see two whitish triangular lines above the eyes meeting at the bill, with a sharp reddish-brown triangle between and a narrow curved line of black under each eye.
At this distance and in this light, you see only a black spot where the eye is, and the question is whether the eyes are open or not.
It sits on the lee side of the tree this raw and windy day. You would say that this was a bird without a neck. Its short bill, which rests upon its breast, scarcely projects at all, but in a state of rest the whole upper part of the bird from the wings is rounded off smoothly, excepting the horns, which stand up conspicuously or are slanted back.
After watching it ten minutes from the boat, I land two rods above, and, stealing quietly up behind the hemlock, though from the windward, I look carefully around it, and, to my surprise, see the owl still sitting there.
So I spring round quickly, with my arm outstretched, and catch it in my hand.
It is so surprised that it offers no resistance at first, only glares at me in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers. But ere long it begins to snap its bill, making quite a noise, and, as I roll it up in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket, it bites my finger slightly.
I soon take it out of my pocket and, tying the handkerchief, leave it on the bottom of the boat. So I carry it home and made a small cage in which to keep it, for a night.
General color of the owl a rather pale and perhaps slightly reddish brown, the feathers centred with black. Perches with two claws above and two below the perch. It is a slight body, covered with a mass of soft and light-lying feathers. Its head muffled in a great hood. It must be quite comfortable in winter.
Dropped a pellet of fur and bones in his cage. He sat, not really moping but trying to sleep, in a corner of his box all day, yet with one or both eyes slightly open all the while. Ordinarily stood rather than sat on his perch.
I never once caught him with his eyes shut.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 28, 1855
See October 29, 1855 ("Carried my owl to the hill again . Had to shake him out of the box, for he did not go of his own accord . . .There he stood on the grass, at first bewildered . . . His attitude expressed astonishment more than anything.”); See also May 7, 1855 ("I looked in, and, to my great surprise, there squatted, filling the hole, which was about six inches deep and five to six wide, a salmon-brown bird not so big as a partridge, seemingly asleep within three inches of the top and close to my face."); May 12, 1855 ("One of the three remaining eggs was hatched, and a little downy white young one, two or three times as long as an egg, lay helpless between the two remaining eggs .. . .Wilson says of his red owl (Strix asio) , — with which this apparently corresponds , and not with the mottled, though my egg is not " pure white, ” – that “the young are at first covered with a whitish down.");) May 25, 1855 ("Scared a screech owl out of an apple tree on hill; flew swiftly off at first like a pigeon woodpecker and lit near by . . .then flew into a hole high in a hickory. . .It was reddish or ferruginous."); May 26, 1855 ("At the screech owl's nest I now find two young slumbering, almost uniformly gray above, about five inches long with little dark-grayish tufts for incipient horns(?)."); July 10, 1856 ("I find myself suddenly within a rod of a gray screech owl sitting on an alder bough with horns erect, turning its head from side to side and up and down . . . Another more red, also horned, repeats the same warning sound . . . I draw near and find a young owl a third smaller than the old, all gray without obvious horns --only four or five feet distant."); December 26, 1860 ("Melvin sent to me yesterday a perfect Strix asio, or red owl of Wilson, - not at all gray. . . . This is, as Wilson says, a bright “nut brown" . . .. It is twenty-three inches alar extent by about eleven long."); February 5, 1861 ("Horace Mann brings me a screech owl . . . This is a decidedly gray owl, with none of the reddish or nut brown of the specimen of December 26, though it is about the same size, and answers exactly to Wilson's mottled owl.") and J. J. Audubon ("The Red Owl of Wilson and other naturalists is merely the young of the bird called by the same authors the Mottled Owl,"). Also aSeptember 23, 1855 (""I hear from my chamber a screech owl . . .a loud, piercing scream, much like the whinny of a colt."); June 2, 1860 ("I soon hear its mournful scream. . . not loud now but, though within twenty or thirty rods, sounding a mile off.”); June 25, 1860 ("At evening up the Assabet hear four or five screech owls on different sides of the river, uttering those peculiar low screwing or working, ventriloquial sounds.”); August 14, 1854 (“I hear the tremulous squealing scream of a screech owl in the Holden Woods.”); October 9, 1851 ("Heard two screech owls in the night") and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Screech Owl
I see a screech owl
sitting on the edge of a
hollow hemlock stump
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