OWLS.
JOHN WINTHROP SCOTT.
BIRDS that fly in the night and whose wings move so smoothly through the air that they make no noise act much like the burglar that gets into your house quietly when you are asleep to steal your money. But the owl is not a burglar. He is the friend of man. There is no other bird that does the farmer so much good as the owl. The owl comes out in the dark to get the small animals that are out at that time stealing things from the farmer. So we may call the owl the night watchman of the farm. He sometimes comes out in the daytime, but most owls prefer the night or at least a dark day.
The owl has been called a wise bird for the same reason that some men are thought to be wise—he looks wise. One reason he looks so steadily at you that you think he is studying you is because the light is so strong in the daytime that his sight is bad. But the owl is not as wise as he is said to be. He does some foolish things as well as other birds. In fact he is sometimes more foolish than any other bird would be in the same place. One owl was known to sit for more than a half day under a leaking water tap. The water fell at the rate of twenty drops a minute right down upon the owl's head, and yet he was not wise enough to move out of the wet.
All owls are not too stupid to learn. Puffy, a tame young owl, caught and ate a two-pound pullet. An old hen afterwards took a fancy to his perch. She went in and gave the little owl a sound whipping, and after that shared the perch with him. He never forgot the lesson the hen had given him and always treated her well.
Owls have a way of hiding from notice by making believe they are something besides owls. They can move their feathers so as to change their looks entirely. The great horned owl sometimes makes himself a frightful mass of feathers a yard wide, and at other times he seems to be a very slim bird, too thin for an owl. Puffy once got away from his master. He flew to the top of a stump and sat like a stake for an hour while his master looked all round the place for him without knowing there was a bird on the stump in plain sight. Owls draw the feathers away from their mouths in an odd way when they eat, and when walking softly to steal upon a mouse tuck up their feathers as a lady lifts her skirts.
Owls are fond of mice. A boy who had a half-grown barn owl tried him one day to see how many mice he would eat. The first four mice went down the owl's throat very quickly. Then number five and number six were eaten in a short time. Number seven did not go down quite as rapidly and number eight was slower still. Number nine was taken greedily, but the owl could not swallow it. The tail hung out of the owl's mouth for awhile before it could be fairly counted. Then no more were eaten till about three hours after, when the owl was pleased to take four more mice.
The gopher is a small animal that does damage to growing things. It digs up corn after it is planted, and it gnaws the roots of fruit trees so as to hurt them badly. Owls catch gophers and eat them. This is one reason why the farmer likes the owl so well. Barn owls sometimes roost with pigeons, but they are good friends. We know they do not eat the pigeons because owls swallow their food whole and have to throw up the bones afterwards, and it is known that the owls living with the pigeons throw up bones of rats and mice but not of pigeons.
Sometimes so many mice have come upon the farms in England that it looked as if everything would be eaten up by them. But a great many owls always came when the mice were so thick and helped the farmers save their crops. One owl was seen to make, in thirty minutes, seventeen trips to her young with food.