Page:Condor19(4).djvu/11

 July, 1917 125 THE WINTER MIGRATION OF 1916-17 IN THE NORTHWEST By J. HOOPER BOWLES WITH TWO PHOTOS HE WINTER of 1916-17 will long be remembered by the ornithologists of the northwest at least, as breaking all previous records for the migration of numerous varieties of northern land birds. I wish to be particularly explicit as to the term land birds as, for some reason, we have had practically no migration of northern sea birds. This is all in very marked contrast to the previous winter of 1915-16, when we experienced the largest migration of northern sea birds that I have ever seen, but practically no migration at all of northern land birds. The winter of 1915-16 was the coldest and most severe that I have known during a residence of twenty years in the northwest, ice and snow remaining on the ground for weeks at a time. The present winter of 1916~17, on the contrary, has been rather a mild one, there having been only a little ice and but a few light falls of snow that have lasted only three or four. days at the most. Returning to the subject in hand, the first migrants of importance to be noted were the Horned Owls, which began putting in their appearance early in the fall of 1916. It is difficult to tell just when this began, because of the pos- sibility of the resident birds being taken. However, as the season advanced specimens were taken in almost all possible gradations of plumage, although I saw none that I should consider perfectly typical of true Bubo virgiiantts subarcticus. Very close approaches to this form were taken, and from these gradations led into extremely dark examples of B. v. saturatus, in fact very nuch darker than any that I have ever seen before. As I have no means o? positively identifying the specimens it is impossible to say just what, or how many, forms may be represented in the dozens of birds that I have examined, but I expect to have this all cleared up at a later date. At first these migrants were regarded only as what might be usually ex- pected here, but soon they became so numerous as to be a veritable pest. Poul- try farms of all kinds were raided without mercy, one example that I shall give in some detail being the gamebird farm belonging to Dr. G. D. Shaver, of Ta- coma. The captive wild ducks seemed to have the most attraction, and of fifty- three that the doctor had at the beginning of last fall, only twenty-six are left at the present writing--and the owls are hooting there now. The doctor shot a number of them, but killed more by poisoning the carcasses left uneaten. These usually had the heads eaten off, after which the owls would drag them in under some log or roll of wire netting where they were well hidden. It is interesting to note that sometimes the owls wogld not return to their kill for a period of time ranging from one to five or six vs. In two instances two owls were poisoned in one night by eating the same bid, and one owl carried a full- grown Mallard hen twenty feet up into a fir tree where both birds were found dead about a week later, the owl firmly clutching the poisoned body of its prey. I examined a great many stomachs of these owls, the contents of which showed about an equal number of mammals and large birds. Nothing smaller. than a Green-winged Teal was found. A number of stomachs contained the re- mains, of hens, curiously enough all of them being Barred Plymouth Rock. This is decidedly strange, because sueh breeds as the White Leghorn outnum-