I was looking right at him and the owl, and I never saw anything but lightning equal the celerity of Sollie’s flight, as he precipitated himself against the netting and caught at my cardinal’s showy red crest. The cardinal screamed like a baby, and I ran to release him, marveling that the owl could so insinuate his little claws through the fine mesh of the wire. However, he could do it, and he gripped the struggling cardinal by the long, hair-like topknot, until I uncurled the wicked little claws. A bunch of red feathers fell to the ground, and the dismayed cardinal flew into a corner.
“Sollie,” I said, going into his cage and taking him in my hand, “how could you be so cruel to that new bird?”
“Oh, coo, coo, coo, coo,” he replied in a delightfully soft little voice, and gently resting his naughty little beak against my face. “You had better come upstairs,” I said, “I am afraid to leave you down here with that poor cardinal. You will be catching him again.”
He cooed once more. This just suited him, and he spent the rest of his life in regions above. I knew that he would probably not live as long in captivity as he would have done if his lot had been cast in the California foothills. His life was too unnatural. In their native state, owls eat their prey whole, and after a time disgorge pellets of bones, feathers, hairs, and scales, the remnants of food that cannot be digested.
My owls, on account of their upbringing, wanted their food cleaned for them. Betsy, one day, after much persuasion, swallowed a mouse to oblige me, but she was such a dismal picture as she sat for a long time with the tail hanging out of her beak that I never offered her another.
I tried to keep Solomon in condition by giving him, or forcing him to take, foreign substances, but my plan only worked for a time.
I always dreaded the inevitable, and one winter day in 1903 I looked sharply at him, as he called to me when I entered the house after being away for a few hours. “That bird is ill!” I said.
No other member of the family saw any change in him, but when one keeps birds and becomes familiar with the appearance of each one, they all have different facial and bodily expressions, and one becomes extremely susceptible to the slightest change. As I examined Sollie, my heart sank within me, and I began to inquire what he had been eating. He had partaken freely of boiled egg, meat, and charcoal. I gave him a dose of olive oil, and I must say that the best bird or beast to take medicine is an owl. Neither he nor Betsy ever objected in the least to opening their beaks and taking any sort of a dose I was minded to give them.
The oil did him no good, and I saw that he was doomed. I kept him beside me during the night, and at four o’clock in the morning he died. Just at the last he opened his eyes, and there was the same strange, luminous, beautiful appearance of the eye-ball that there had been when Betsy died. I have seen many birds die, but have never, except in the case of the owls, noticed this opening of the eyes, with the curious illumination.
We missed the little fellow immensely, for he often insinuated his pretty little cooing note in the midst of our family conversation. He knew each one of us, and would call out when we came near him, but a stranger he always received in silence, and with raised ear tufts.