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 slowly upward to a height so dizzy that the crows
dare not follow.
In the early spring I have utilized this habit of the crows in my
search for owls' nests.
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