A barred owl

December 14. 

I see at Derby’s shop a barred owl (Strix nebulosa), taken in the woods west of the factory on the 11th, found (with its wing broke) by a wood chopper. 

It measures about three and a half feet in alar extent by eighteen to twenty inches long, or nearly the same as the cat owl, but is small and without horns. It is very mild and quiet, bears handling perfectly well, and only snaps its bill with a loud sound at the sight of a cat or dog. It is apparently a female, since it is large and has white spots on the wings. The claws are quite dark rather than dark horn-color. It hopped into the basin of the scales, and I was surprised to find that it weighed only one pound and one ounce. It may be thin-fleshed on account of its broken wing, but how light-bodied these fliers are! It has no yellow iris like the cat owl, and has the bristles about its yellow bill which the other has not. It has a very smooth and handsome round head, a brownish gray. 

Solemnity is what they express, — fit representatives of the night.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 14, 1858


A barred owl (Strix nebulosa). See December 9, 1856 (“every week almost I hear the loud voice of the hooting owl, though I do not see the bird more than once in ten years. ”); January 7, 1854 ("Strange that we should hear this sound so often, loud and far, — a voice which we call the owl, — and yet so rarely see the bird.”)