“No, it does not think of it, either. It does not know that pears spoil and nuts keep, because it has never tried to keep pears. It does not foresee that when it wakes up, the fruit-trees will not be bearing fruit, will hardly have their first leaves; it does not know how long it would have to wait to find a pear to nibble; it knows nothing of all these things, which it is now about to become aware of, perhaps for the first time, through experience. Some one else thinks for the dormouse and gives it the prudence to store up nuts in a hole in the wall; some one who understands, foresees, and knows everything. And that some one is God, the Father of the man who plants the pear-tree, and Father also of the little dormouse that is so fond of pears.” [[114]]
[1] The French campagnol is translated in this book by meadow-mouse. The term vole, another rendering, is purely British and too uncommon in America to warrant its use in these pages.—Translator. [↑]
CHAPTER XV
HORNED OWLS
“We have glanced in a cursory way at a number of our rodents that are harmful to crops. I pass over in silence the pretty squirrel, a lover of walnuts and beechnuts, and the industrious beaver, an animal which may still be found, here and there, along the Rhone. The hare and the rabbit, too, I willingly give over to the hunter’s rifle. What protection have we from the devouring hunger of the others—the rats, the field-mice, and the meadow-mice? How are we to hold them in check? In our homes we have the cat; outside we have the army of feathered cats—the nocturnal birds of prey. I will divide these latter into two classes, to make it easier to distinguish the various species. One has the head adorned with two tufts of feathers—plumicorns is the term sometimes used—while the other class lacks this ornament. Horned owls come under the first classification; hornless owls, or those that may be called simply owls, come under the second.
American Long-eared Owl
“The largest of the horned owls is the eagle-owl. ‘It can easily be recognized,’ says Buffon, ‘by its burly form, its enormous head, its large and cavernous ears, the two egrets surmounting its head to a height of more than two inches and a half, its short [[115]]hooked beak, black in color, its great clear eyes with their fixed gaze and large black pupils, encircled by an orange-colored ruff of feathers, and its face surrounded by hairs—or, rather, little rudimentary white feathers bordering a ring of other little feathers that are curled—also by its black hooked claws of great strength, its very short neck, its reddish brown plumage spotted with black and yellow on the back, its feet covered with thick down and reddish feathers to the very roots of the nails, and, finally, its hair-raising cry of whee-hoo, hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, poo-hoo, which it sends forth in the silence of the night when all the rest of the world is still. Then it is that it awakens its intended victims, fills them with vague alarm, pursues and catches them, and carries them off to the caverns where it has its hiding-place. It lives among the rocks or in old deserted towers in the mountains, rarely descending into the plains and never willingly perching on trees, but rather on the roof of some sequestered church or ancient castle. Its favorite prey consists of young hares, little rabbits, field-mice, and rats, of which it digests the fleshy substance and throws up the hair, bones, and skin in round balls. The eagle-owl [[116]]makes its nest in some rocky cave or in a hole in some lofty old wall. Its nest is nearly three feet in diameter, and is made of small dry branches interwoven with flexible roots and padded with leaves inside. Only one or two, or rarely as many as three, eggs are found in this nest. In color they somewhat resemble the bird’s plumage, and in size they are larger than hens’ eggs.’ ”