A family of screech owls

Eastern Screech Owl

July 10.

Yesterday a heavy rain.

5 p. m. — Up Assabet.

As I bathe under the swamp white oaks at 6 p. m., hear a suppressed sound often repeated -- like perhaps the working of bees through a bung-hole -- which I already suspect to produced by owls. I am uncertain whether it is far or near.

Proceeding a dozen rods up-stream on the south side, toward where a catbird mews incessantly, 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, and peering at me in that same ludicrously solemn and complacent way that I had noticed in one in captivity. 

Another more red, also horned, repeats the same warning sound or call to its young about the same distance off in another direction on an alder.

When they take flight they make some noise with their wings. With their short tails and squat figures they looked very clumsy -- all head and shoulders.

Hearing a fluttering under the alders 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. It flits along two rods and I follow it. I see at least two or more young.

All this was close by that thick hemlock grove, and they perched on alders and an apple tree in the thicket there. These birds kept opening their eyes when I moved, as if to get clearer sight of me. The young were very quick to notice any motion of the old, and so betrayed their return by looking in that direction when they returned, though I had not heard it. Though they permitted me to come so near with so much noise, they noticed the coming and going of the old birds, even when I did not.

There were four or five owls in all. I have heard a somewhat similar note, further off and louder, in the night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 10, 1856

I am uncertain whether it is far or near. See 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.”)

. . .peer[s] at me in that same ludicrously solemn and complacent way that I had noticed in one in captivity. See October 28, 1855("catch it in my hand. It is so surprised that it ... only glares at me in mute astonishment with eyes as big as saucers.”) and October 29, 1855 ("There he stood on the grass, at first bewildered, ... His attitude expressed astonishment more than anything.”)

I have heard a somewhat similar note, further off and louder, in the night. See September 23, 1855 ("I hear from my chamber a screech owl about Monroe’s house this bright moonlight night, — a loud, piercing scream, much like the whinny of a colt . . .”)

July 10. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 10

  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021