390 BULLETIN 170, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



tails, pocket gophers, chipmunks, shrews, and even bats. To test the 

 ability of these owls to kill ground squirrels, Major Bendire (1892) 

 experimented with a pair he had in captivity; he writes: 



I fed a pair of these Owls four live full-grown Townsend's ground squirrels in 

 one day, besides the carcasses of five small birds that I had skinned, and was 

 astonished at the ease and celerity with which these rodents were killed and the 

 small amount of resistance they made. I watched the proceedings through a 

 small hole in the door. As soon as a squirrel was turned loose in the room with 

 the Owls, one of them would pounce on it, and, fastening its sharp talons firmly 

 in the back of the squirrel, spread its wings somewhat, and with a few vigorous 

 and well-directed blows of its beak break the vertebras of the neck, and before it 

 was fairly dead it commenced eating the head. This was always eaten first and 

 is the favorite part. Next morning there was but little left of squirrels or birds, 

 and the two Owls had certainly eaten considerably more than their own weight 

 in the twenty-four hours. 



C. E. McBee (1927) reports large numbers of mice found in burrows 

 of these owls near Kiona, Wash.; one burrow contained 25 mice and 

 3 sage rats, another 15 mice and 2 sage rats, and others lesser numbers; 

 in examining a number of their nests, he found only one bird, a 

 young dusky horned lark. Among the birds taken, horned larks 

 seem to be oftener reported than any other species. F. A. Patton 

 (1926), writing from South Dakota, says: "In examining these bur- 

 rows I found about the entrance, and down in the burrows, quantities 

 of feathers of the Desert Horned Lark, mostly wing and tail feathers. 

 Digging into the burrows I would find from four to six partly eaten 

 larks, mostly young birds just flying; also usually a less amount of 

 partly eaten field mice. Not a burrow did I find but showed evidence 

 that more than fifty per cent of the food of these owls were larks, which 

 were being killed by the thousands." 



Feathers, or other remains, of least sandpiper, black-headed gros- 

 beak, western meadowlark, Bell's vireo, and various sparrows, or 

 other small birds, have been found in or about the burrows, but most 

 observers agree that they form only a small part of the total food. 

 Bendire never found any bird remains in any of the many burrows 

 that he examined. 



Various miscellaneous items enter into the food of the burrowing 

 owl, such as lizards, snakes, frogs, toads, salamanders, fishes, scorpions, 

 centipedes, and myriapods. Paul Thompson writes to me that he 

 has found the remains of a cecropia moth, two forewings and head, 

 at the entrance of a burrow, and that the remains about burrows 

 near ponds and creeks consist largely of crayfishes. In one case he 

 found a wing and a leg of a burrowing owl at the entrance of a burrow ; 

 this owl may have been killed on a nearby road and brought to the 

 burrow to be eaten. 



A comprehensive study of the food habits of burrowing owls in 

 northwestern Iowa has recently been published by Errington and 

 Bennett (1935). 



