A gray screech owl.

 

February 5.

Horace Mann brings me a screech owl, which was caught in Hastings's barn on the meeting-house avenue. It had killed a dove there.

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.

Rice brings me an oak stick with a woodpecker's hole in it by which it reached a pupa.

The first slight rain and thaw of this winter was February 2d .

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1861

This is a decidedly gray owl, with none of the reddish or nut brown of the specimen of December 26 and answers exactly to Wilson's mottled owl. See 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.") See also 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.")

 We hike to the fort via the rope trail making new tracks in compressed snow over a foot deep. At the lower view hear the spring note of the chickadee one seems to be calling another and then one carries on for quite some time hear the white breasted nuthatch as well I stay out of janes trail and for once keep up with her as it turns out because she is in excruciating pain with her right foot flopping to one side. But this is alleviated by a small adjustment to the padding after we get to the fort for the most part the dogs trail behind us 1, 2, 3 but as we near the Fort  acorn runs head crosses the stream and goes up there and waits. Loki meanwhile begins to trot and hunt through the deep snow. It was a good plan to leave the chair upside-down as I have a dry seat the temperature is a little over 30° perhaps over freezing and there is some sun in the woods and then in the tops of the trees and cliffs as dusk approaches we stop on porcupine ridge and look up at the pine tops glowing in the sun.

As dusk approaches

we look up at the pine tops

glowing in the sun. 

February 5, 2021