THE BIRD OF NIGHT 



used to occupy my next door neighbor's bird box. One 

 Sunday morning the sexton was starting a fire in the 

 church furnace when he discovered a poor httle Screech 

 Owl, blinking in the smoke, and pulled it out just in 

 time to save its life. It well deserved to be spared this 

 or any disaster, for it is a fine thing for a town to have 

 resident Screech Owls to keep down the English Spar- 

 row nuisance. There is a village not far from where I 

 live where one winter a Screech Owl stayed all the time 

 in a thick spruce right by the post office and ate so 

 many sparrows that by spring there were hardly any 

 left. They are great mousers, too, as are most kinds 

 of owls, and no one ought to kill them. The one 

 exception is the Great Horned Owl, which is liable to 

 make great inroads on poultry, if it once finds its way 

 to their quarters, though generally it stays in the woods 

 and feeds mostly on rabbits, skunks, and, unfortunately, 

 the Ruffed Grouse. 



A friend of mine has a nice aviary of domesticated 

 wild geese and ducks, a tract of meadow close to the 

 brook beside his home, fenced in with wire, but not 

 covered overhead. This summer he began to lose his 

 ducks ; every morning one w^as missing. Finally, when 

 he found a beautiful Pintail drake dead and partly eaten 

 he decided that the intruder must be the Great Horned 

 Owl which hooted off on the mountain. So he put up 

 a fifteen-foot pole at one corner of the yard, with a steel 

 trap set on top of it. The owl will always alight on 

 some commanding perch and look around before 



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