Barn Owl (Strix Flammea), Volume 2, Plate 171

Painted in 1832. The background in the original watercolor is white; Audubon instructed his engraver Havell to add a night scene. The landscape, Havell’s invention, eerily anticipates Thomas Cole’s 1836 painting View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm-The Oxbow, known as The Oxbow (1836).

One of two genuine night scenes in Birds of America. The two owls (the slightly larger female is perched on the top branch; the male is stretching towards her below) were given to Audubon by Richard Harlan of Philadelphia. Audubon’s genius is evident in his creative use of the ground squirrel as a compositional device (note that one of the female’s claws seems to penetrate the rodent’s right eye-an instance of violated sight, Audubon’s favorite leitmotif). The vertical line marked by the squirrel’s limp body serves to anchor the composition, intersecting as it does with the powerful diagonals of the dead branches and the slanted bodies of the two birds. At the same time, the poor little animal seems almost like a piece of candy the female, her head jauntily cocked, holds down to her greedy partner, taunting him. To the corresponding essay Audubon appends a short narrative about the ground squirrel in which he imagines himself pursuing one of these rodents into its burrow as if he himself were a Barn Owl: “Stone after stone I have removed from the fence, but in vain, for beneath the whole the cunning creature has formed its deep and circuitous burrow. With my hatchet I cut the tangled roots, and as I follow the animal in its innermost recesses, I hear its angry voice, I am indeed within a few inches of his last retreat, and now I see his large dark protruding eye.” But then, surprisingly, he allows the squirrel to disappear: “at this moment out he rushes with such speed that it would be vain to follow him. … I willingly leave him unmolested in that to which he has now betaken himself.” Audubon is, after all, not a Barn Owl.

From John James Audubon’s Ornithological Biography

This species is altogether nocturnal or crepuscular, and when disturbed during the day, flies in an irregular bewildered manner, as if at a loss how to look for a place of refuge. After long observation, I am satisfied that our bird feeds entirely on the smaller species of quadrupeds, for I have never found any portions of birds about their nests, nor even the remains of a single feather in the pellets which they regurgitate, and which are always formed of the bones and hair of quadrupeds. … Its flight is light, regular, and much protracted. It passes through the air at an elevation of thirty or forty feet, in perfect silence, and pounces on its prey like a Hawk, often waiting for a fair opportunity from the branch of a tree, on which it alights for the purpose. During day, they are never seen, unless accidentally disturbed, when they immediately try to hide themselves. I am not aware of their having any propensity to fish, as the Snowy Owl has, nor have I ever seen one pursuing a bird. Ever careful of themselves, they retreat to the hollows of trees and such holes as they find about old buildings. When kept in confinement, they feed freely on any kind of flesh, and will stand for hours in the same position, frequently resting on one leg, while the other is drawn close to the body. In this position I watched one on my drawing table for six hours.