se
and peep in, and then go screaming back again, hopping about on their
perches, cawing at every breath, nodding their heads, striking the
branches, and acting for all the world like excited stump speakers.

The din grows louder and louder; fresh voices are coming in every
minute; and the owl, wondering in some vague way if he is the cause of
it all, flies off to some other tree where he can be quiet and go to
sleep. Then, with a great rush and clatter, the crows follow, some
swift old scout keeping close to the owl and screaming all the way to
guide the whole cawing rabble. When the owl stops they gather round
again and go through the same performance more excitedly than before.
So it continues till the owl finds some hollow tree and goes in out of
sight, leaving them to caw themselves tired; or else he finds some
dense pine grove, and doubles about here and there, with that shadowy
noiseless flight of his, till he has thrown them off the track. Then
he flies into the thickest tree he can find, generally outside the
grove where the crows are looking, and sitting close up against the
trunk blinks his great yellow eyes and listens to the racket that goes
sweeping through the grove, peering curiously into every thick pine,
searching everywhere for the lost excitement.

The crows give him up reluctantly. They circle for a few minutes over
the grove, rising and falling with that beautiful, regular motion
that seems like the practice drill of all gregarious birds, and
generally end by collecting in some tree at a distance and _hawing_
about it for hours, till some new excitement calls them elsewhere.

Just why they grow so excited over an owl is an open question. I have
never seen them molest him, nor show any tendency other than to stare
at him occasionally and make a great noise about it. That they
recognize him as a thief and cannibal I have no doubt. But he thieves
by night when other birds are abed, and as they practise their own
thieving by open daylight, it may be that they are denouncing him as
an impostor. Or it may be that the owl in his nightly prowlings
sometimes snatches a young crow off the roost. The great horned owl
would hardly hesitate to eat an old crow if he could catch him
napping; and so they grow excited, as all birds do in the presence of
their natural enemies. They make much the same kind of a fuss over a
hawk, though the latter easily escapes the annoyance by flying swiftly
away, or by circling