24 AdKICULTUKE OF MAINE. 



tomato can will do, with a hole cut the right size and the edges 

 turned down, and a little hole in the bottom so the rain will run 

 out. A box was picked up back of the barn and a hole cut in it 

 for the bluebird, and the bluebird took it the next day. 



Then we made an owl box, and I will have to tell you some- 

 thing about these owls. I went out one day in the grove on the 

 south side of my house, a pine grove about sixty years old, and 

 I picked up 1 6 elongated balls of fur. I took them into the 

 house and showed them to my prospective son-in-law, and asked 

 him what they were. He said, "Those are mice crwjuettes a la 

 owl." He had been studying biology in Clark University, and 

 he knew what they were, but you would not find much nourish- 

 ment in those croquettes. I once had a young owl which I 

 kept for a while in a cage. He was a very modest owl. He 

 would never eat when any one was looking, but if you put a 

 rat, alive or dead, into his cage, and went away for a minute or 

 two, and then came back, you would find him standing up on his 

 hind legs just the same, with the rat's tail hanging out of the 

 left side of his mouth. I always thought that owl was left 

 handed. The owls do not chew up rats and mice. They do not 

 Fletcherize at all. They tear the food to pieces if necessary; 

 but they sw^allow it whole if they can and then the stomach takes 

 the little animal and digests all the soft parts complete and 

 clean, polishes up the bones even, and then the stomach takes 

 the bones and the fur and wnnds them around, the fur outside, 

 and the whole thing is thrown up out of the mouth. That is 

 what I found on the ground. We found in those little balls of 

 fur the remains of thirty-four of the mice that eat the bark of 

 our fruit trees, and I said, "We must keep owls here." So we 

 put a box up in the grove and the very next night there was a 

 little screech owl in the entrance. The owds kept coming, and 

 going in and out of the box, until they finally disappeared. One 

 day I climbed up and looked in and there was the nest all built 

 and the mother bird sitting on her eggs. A\'e left the nest alone 

 until the eggs were hatched, and then we could do anything we 

 pleased with those owls. We could take the box down from 

 the tree with a claw hammer and screw driver, nail it up on 

 another tree in the sunlight, take the w^hole front ofif, take any 

 picture we liked, and then put the front on and nail it up again. 

 First we saw the mother bird sitting on the bunch of little downy 



