PONDS, PADDOCKS, AND AVIARIES 47 



opportunity, to protect and encourage these birds ; they 

 are excellent mouse-catchers, very bad neighbours to young 

 sparrows in their nests, and therefore valuable friends 

 to farmers and gardeners. The nest of this owl is 

 generally placed either in a hollow tree at no great height 

 from the ground, or in vacant spaces in the masonry 

 of old buildings. The parent birds are very bold in 

 defence of their young, and a neighbour of ours has had 

 his hat knocked off by one of these little owls as he 

 passed near the ash-tree in which there was a brood of 

 young — a fact of which he was quite unconscious. I 

 confess that when this story was originally told to me 

 by a third person I had my doubts as to its truth, but 

 last summer I had an opportunity of enquiring from 

 the aforesaid neighbour, who assured me that not only 

 was this story perfectly true, but that he had been again 

 attacked last year, in a different locaHty, by a little owl, 

 which no doubt had young ones in the roof of an old 

 church hard by. These little owls are very easily tamed, 

 if taken in hand whilst quite young, and, besides their 

 taste for mice, are very efficient in the destruction of 

 cockroaches and other beetles. 



*' I cannot help once more taking up a text that I 

 have, I fear, worn almost threadbare already ; it is — never 

 destroy or molest an owl of any sort. I consider all the 

 owls as not only harmless, but most useful, and the barn, 

 white, or screech-owl as perhaps the most serviceable to 

 man of English birds. I think that farmers and game- 



