CHAPTER I
THE STORY OF TWO OWLS
The birds that really started me in the serious, and yet amusing task of keeping an aviary, were two little Californian screech owls.
The year was 1899, and I was studying boy life in the charming Belmont School, twenty-five miles from San Francisco. The grounds of the school lie on the lower slope of hills that enclose an open valley fronting the bay of San Francisco. A walk of twelve miles took us to the shores of the Pacific. Close to the school were beautiful cañons that the boys and older persons were never tired of exploring. The lads of the school were allowed to keep dogs, horses, pigeons, poultry—indeed, any pets they chose to have. One day, when I was up in the poultry yard, where there were some choice bantams and game-fowl, I saw a boy trotting about with a box in his hand.
“What have you there?” I asked.
“Four little owls,” he replied. “I got them the other day when I was out walking, and I had their mother too, but she has flown away.”
“What are you going to do with them?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he replied thoughtfully. “I don’t want to bother with them. I suppose it would be best to kill them.”
I looked in the box. Those four solemn-eyed, motherless balls of down appealed to me. In southern California I had been very much taken with the little owls that sat on hillocks, and turned their heads round and round to look after any one riding or driving by, until it really seemed as if they would twist them off.
I felt that I must adopt these little Northerners, so I said to the boy, “I will take them.”
He joyfully resigned his charges, for he did not like the idea of destroying them, and I thoughtfully pursued my way to my room; what did owls eat?