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Even more impressed by Wolf than he had been by Lear, Gould took him on the fieldwork for The Birds of Great Britain, where he was a great help, particularly because (unlike Gould) he could recognise birdsong. But again the relationship failed to flourish, because Wolf was disappointed by the final illustrations, finding them over-coloured, with unnecessarily fanciful backgrounds (see Tree 201).

Another criticism levelled against Gould is that some of these birds were rarely, if ever, to be found in the wild in Britain. The Eagle Owl is one such. In the passage given below, he has to depend on other naturalists for a description of its nest and eggs. Perhaps this is fortunate, because the only means of detailed observation then was via gunshot, and nest-raiding. An accidental visitor here would not have stood much chance of moving on.

This brings up another problem with Gould's prodigious labours. Generally, they involved killing birds and raiding their nests: Roslyn Russell records his killing "a splendid eagle" while in Australia, and gathering Black Swan eggs there (38). Should he be blamed for adopting the accepted methods? Probably not. But it is worth pointing out that the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert White had shown more empathy with birds, and preferred to study living creatures in their natural habitats; and that, when conservationism began to gain ground in his own times, Gould was not among its "most vociferous" supporters (Tree 203).

One last point: this illustration emphasises the family life of the bird, something quite rare at the time and new for Gould. If this was done on his instruction, it appears to have been one of the tactics he adopted for combating Darwinism, presenting instead "a reassuring look at a natural world that was not in flux but fixed, not unstable but stable, not wantonly violent but purposefully designed" (Smith 94).

Commentary by John Gould

If I were to indulge in a poetic vein while writing the history of this noble species, which stands at the head of all the European Owls, I might speak of its selection as the emblem of all that is wise and learned, or I might take up another strain and write upon its midnight voice, or upon its presence being regarded as an omen of death and other evil forebodings; hut I will let such fancies and fallacies stand for what they are worth and write a page on its history — not that I have any additional information to communicate respecting its natural habits and economy.

The Great Horned or Eagle Owl, which is unquestionably the largest and finest species of the birds for which the generic term of Bubo is now employed, is a native of the northern regions of the Old World, and is represented in the New by the Bubo Virginiajius. The two species bear a very general resemblance to each other, but each possesses well-defined characters by which they may be distinguished. The regions of the Old World in which the present bird dwells are the forest- or mountain-districts of Central Europe, Norway, Sweden, Russia, and Siberia, as far as the Amoor land. In England, Ireland, and Scotland it is extremely scarce, and its presence, when it does occur therein, must be regarded as purely accidental. In fact, should the traveller consider that if he made a journey to the European continent, whether it be to Norway or Switzerland, he would meet with this noble bird, and see its great fiery eyes blazing from the branch of a forest-tree, or its egrets standing erect in the sky-line when surmounting a rock, or hear its hollow hooting from a gully, he would probably be disappointed; for nowhere is the bird abundant, and it is only in some favoured locality, far from the abode of man, that it takes up its quarters for the purpose of breeding. The areas over which the mated pairs range must be of considerable extent, and the amount of food necessary for their existence commensurately great. I should suppose that there is no one of my readers who has not seen this bird in a state of captivity; for there are not many parts of England, from the renowned Castle of Arundel in the south to the successful rearing in cages of my friend Edward Fountaine, Esq., of Easton near Norwich, in the north, where living examples may not be seen, and nowhere to greater advantage than in the fine Menagerie of the Zoological Society in the Regent’s Park.

The food of this powerful Owl consists of fawns, hares, grouse, and other birds, which are pounced upon on the ground and seized with its feet, the head being rarely advanced towards the prey until its struggles are over.

By far the best account of the nest and eggs of the Eagle Owl is that furnished to Mr. Hewitson by the late Mr. John Wolley, and published in the third edition of his work on the Eggs of British Birds; and I am sure I shall be held excused for copying his graphic description instead of attempting to describe what I have not seen myself.

After expressing the great difficulty of “hunting up the ornithological population of such a country” as Norway, where the birds are few and the area over which they are scattered vast and almost inaccessible, he writes — “First, I was determined to find a nest of Strix bubo; many expeditions of some miles, and several days lost, have resulted in the finding of a single nest wath two young ones and an egg just hatching, and this after inquiries at every place I have been to. It was on the 20th of May, and after climbing to the mysterious cave of Skulberg, that our road lay under a steep mountain-side broken up into crags and ledges of the character which is usually so attractive to birds of prey. There was a little village at the foot; and an old man pointed out the direction from which the hootings were to be heard every evening. Whilst I was listening to the consultation and taking a survey with my glass, an Osprev flew along the edge of the cliff, at a great height above us, and, mellowed in the distance, there came a full note from a Berg-ufo, who no doubt had seen the stranger bird. This was very eneouraging, and it did not take long to arrange the order in which the various likely rocks were to he visited. An active wood-man accompanied me axe in hand. When we were fairly in the clilfs, we came to a point w'here some large bird was in the habit of sitting to tear its prey, and feathers and white feet of hares were lying about. A great Owl flew below us, showing a beautiful expanse of hack and wings ; and as we proceeded in the direction from which it came, another large Owl rose from the face of the cliff, flew a hundred paces forward, turned its wide face towards us, and came a short distance hack. I stopped to examine it with my glass, to he quite certain it was S. bubo. Satisfied on this point, we had only to walk a few paces along a ledge before the family group was in sight — two blind little puffs covered with down just tinged with yellow, and an egg with the prisoner inside uttering his series of four or five chirps through the window he had made in the shell, with a voice scarcely more feeble than that of his older brothers. There did not seem to be much difference in the ages of the three: they were lying upon a small quantity of com- pressed fur, principally of rats, the remains of the castings of the parent birds, their bed nearly flat, for there was not more than two Inches of soil. Uva-ursi and several other plants grew near, and a small Scotch fir tree had its bark curiously flattened to the perpendicular rock at the back ; the ledge was not more than two feet wide, and terminated abruptly just beyond the nest; the rock beneath was also perpendicular. A party of village ladies watching us from below were very successful in imitating the Owls, but the Owls themselves would not answer. We waited at the nest a long time in the hope that they would show them- selves; but it was not till we had left it that we saw them again, sitting on the topmost shoots of spruce firs, with their ears finely relieved against the sky; and when we were nearly in the village again, they hooted with a troubled note. I have visited three other sites of nests of this bird; and they were all of the same character, upon ledges in or over the cliffs. They were all unsheltered overhead. Sunshine seems to be courted rather than avoided.”

“Although,” says Mr. Wheelwright, “I neither saw the bird nor obtained its nest in Lapland, it bred on a high mountain just opposite Quickiock, on the other side of the river; and the deep-measured ‘hoo, hoo" of the old bird, resembling the distant bark of a gruff old watch-dog, might be heard on any evening when we were out in the neighbourhood of its eyrie. I have not unfrequently taken the nest in Wermland, and it breeds commonly both around Gothenburg and in the south of Sweden; but I think its proper home is more in the midland than in the northern districts of the country. The egg is the largest of all the European Owls’ eggs, often measuring 2 3/8 by 2 inches.”

The Eagle Owl, however, does not always breed on rocks. A nest containing young ones and a single addled egg is mentioned by Mr. A. Newton in his Ootheca Wolleyana (p. 164).

In his notes on the birds observed by him in the Ionian Islands, Lord Lilford says, “I very often heard and occasionally saw this species in Epirus and Albania proper, in which provinces it is common and breeds. One of our party killed a fine specimen near Prevesa, on the Gulf of Arta, in March 1857. I shot a female near Butrlnto, in February 1858, and was in at the death of another near Santa Quaranta shortly afterwards. I was watching a pair of Bonelli’s Eagles one day near Butrinto, when an Eagle Owl came flying past me in a much more hurried manner than is its wont, and took refuge in a thorn-bush, about a gun-shot from where I stood. He had hardly reached this shelter before a Peregrine Falcon stooped at, and just missing him, rose and "made her point." I drove the Owl out, and was witness of a beautiful flight across an open plain of considerable extent — the Falcon making repeated feints, the Owl flying low and dodging round the scanty thorn-bushes, till he at length reached a hillside thickly covered with wild olives, and set his pursuer at defiance.” (Ibis, I860, p. 133.)

No person in England has been so successful in breeding this bird as Mr. Edward Fountaine, who informs me that he has reared thirty-five birds out of forty-six eggs — a fact of considerable interest.

The localities in the British Islands in which this bird has occurred are, according to Mr. Yarrell, Kent, Sussex, and Devonshire, Suffolk, Yorkshire, and Durham. It does not appear to have been seen in Scotland, and the only record of its occurrence in Ireland appears in Mr. Stewart’s Catalogue of the Birds of Donegal, in the following words: — “Four of these birds paid us a visit for two days after a great storm from the north, when the ground was covered with snow. They have not been seen since.”

The colouring of the soft parts of the young at one day old is as follows: cere and bill purplish blue, with a distinct white projecting knob about an eighth of an inch from the point; body covered with buffy white down; soles of the feet flesh-colour.

The sexes are alike in colour; but the female is somewhat smaller than the male.

The figures in the Plate are about two-thirds of the natural size.

Bibliography

Gould, John. The Birds of Great Britain Vol. 1.. London: Gould, 1873. Internet Archive. Contributed by Smithsonian Libraries. Web. 3 April 2019.

Russell, Roslyn. The Business of Nature: John Gould and Austrlia. Canberra: National Library of Australia. 2011.

Smith, Jonathan. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Pbk ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. See Ch. 3, "Darwin's Birds," on Gould, Darwin and Ruskin.

Tree, Isabella. The Ruling Passion of John Gould. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

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