A little owl

January  6.  

— To M. Miles’s. 

Near Nut Meadow Brook, on the Jimmy Miles road, I see a flock of snow buntings. They are feeding exclusively on that ragged weed which I take to be Roman wormwood. Their tracks where they sink in the snow are very long, i. e., have a very long heel, or sometimes almost in a single straight line. They made notes when they went,—sharp, rippling, like a vibrating spring. They had run about to every such such, leaving distinct tracks raying from and to them, While the snow immediately about the weed was so tracked and pecked where the seeds fell that no track was distinct. 

Miles had hanging in his barn a little owl (Strix Acadica) which he caught alive with his hands about a week ago. He had forced it to eat, but it died. It was a funny little brown bird, spotted with white, seven and a half inches long to the end of the tail, or eight to the end of the claws, by nineteen in alar extent, — not so long by considerable as a robin, though much stouter. This one had three (not two)  white bars on its tail, but no noticeable white at the tip. Its cunning feet were feathered quite to the extremity of the toes, looking like whitish (or tawny-white) mice, or as when one pulls stockings over his boots. 

As usual, the white spots on the upper sides of the wings are smaller and a more distinct white, while those beneath are much larger, but a subdued, satiny white. Even a bird’s wing has an upper and under side, and the last admits only of more subdued and tender colors.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 6, 1859

They made notes when they went,—sharp, rippling, like a vibrating spring. See January 6, 1856 (“While I am making a path to the pump, I hear hurried rippling notes of birds, look up, and see quite a flock of snow buntings”). Also January 21, 1857 (“Beside their rippling note, they have a vibratory twitter”).

A funny little brown bird, spotted with white, seven and a half inches long.  The Little Owl is known in Massachusetts by the name of the "Saw-whet," the sound of its love-notes bearing a great resemblance to the noise produced by filing the teeth of a large saw. ~ JJ Audubon.  Compare December 14, 1858 (“ a barred owl (Strix nebulosa), . . . measures about three and a half feet in alar extent by eighteen to twenty inches long,  . . . apparently a female, since it is large and has white spots on the wings.”)

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 6.

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 © 2009-2022