Ian & Tweeters,

My reference: de la Torre, J. (1990) Owls:their life and behavior. New
York: Crown Publishers.

Despite the following quote from Audubon himself, I believe de l Torre.
>From Audubon's Ornithological Biography, " The Little Owl is known in
Massachusetts by the name of the 'Saw-whet,' the sound of its love-notes
bearing a great resemblance to the noise produced by filing the teeth of
a large saw. These notes, when coming, as they frequently do, from the
interior of a deep forest, produce a very peculiar effect on the
traveller, who, not being aware of their real nature, expects, as he
advances on his route, to meet with shelter under a saw-mill at no great
distance."

De la Torre spends two pages, which I shall shorten: "...the name of the
owl is almost certainly an anglicization of the French word chouette
(shoo-ET), a word universally used in France and French Canada to refer
to any small owl. La chouette is indeed what farmers in the Gaspe and
elsewhere in the French-speaking Canada call this little owl, which for
them is a backyard species. The anglicized version of the word probably
arose out of interactions between American north country woodsman and
their Quebecois counterparts. One need only imagine an Acadian campsite
at which a moose and bear tracker from Calais, Maine, hears a beaver
hunter from Riviere du Louip say " Ca? Ca c'est la chouette?" in answer
to the Yankee's request for the name of an absurdly confiding little owl
he has just caught napping in the bough of a spruce sapling. When one
further takes into account that many French Canadians substitute an s
sound for the initial ch and say soo-WET, the derivation becomes even
more likely."

De la Torre then procedes to debunk Audubon. Audubon heard shrill sounds
coming from inside his saw-mill in Henderson Kentucky on a hot summer
day, and concluded that they must be coming from the owl that the New
Englanders referred to as a Saw-whet, because the noise sounded like a
saw being sharpened. Audubon did not see the bird, but his foreman did,
and called it a "screech-owl", a universal term for barn owl among local
farm folk of the era.

So Audubon hears a Barn Owl, and names a Saw-whet.

No offense to the Great One, but I go along with de la Torre.....

Jamie Acker
Bainbridge Island,WA
Biowler1 at juno.com


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