The screech owl is especially fond of insects and mice. When his tremulous 

 cry is heard at night, it is "high time" for mice and rats to hunt their holes, for 

 owls will get them "if they don't watch out." The long-eared owls are also 

 famous mousers. More than a hundred pellets thrown out of the mouth (regurgi- 

 tated) by a pair of these owls, contained fur in every instance while not one 

 pellet contained feathers. This pair certainly preferred rodents to birds or 

 poultry. The short-eared owls have much the same record as the marsh hawk 

 and may be found in similar situations, hunting much in the same way as the 

 marsh hawk, particularly on dark cloudy days. Barred owls are said to do more 

 good than harm, while the curious looking "monkey faced" or bam owl is the 

 best one of all. A. K. Fisher gathered up the pellets dropped near the nest of 

 a pair of barn owls in the tower of the Smithsonian Institution and found in them 

 454 skulls of small animals. These skulls represented 225 destructive meadow 

 mice, 179 house mice, twenty rats, twenty shrews, six jumping mice, two pine 

 mice, one star-nosed mole, and one vesper sparrow. Certainly such a record gives 

 the barn owl a right to live. Only the very large "great horned owl" is ever 

 charged with any notable injury, and such charges are very rare. Most people 

 woud place him in the class which are neither decidedly beneficial nor harmful. 

 Under the beneficial class, Fisher groups the marsh hawk, red-tailed hawk, red- 

 shouldered hawk, sparrow hawk, barn owl, long-eared owl, short-eared owl, barred 

 owl, screech owl, snowy owl, and several others of less importance. 



Under the heading "Harmful Hawks and Owls," Fisher places the sharp- 

 shinned hawk, Cooper's hawk and three others of less consequence in Illinois. 

 But he does not name a single owl as belonging here. He should have left the 

 word "Owls" out of this heading, I believe, since none are really "harmful." 



Dr. C. Hart Merriam estimated that each hawk and owl in Pennsylvania is 

 worth at least twenty dollars to the farmer. Certainly, if these birds are so 

 valuable in Pennsylvania, they are much more valuable in a great agricultural 

 State like Illinois where rodents and insects are so very destructive. It seems 

 unreasonable, as Fisher and others have pointed out, that many people will fondle 

 and protect a disease-spreading, bird-eating, poultry-stealing cat, and make war 

 upon our beneficial birds of prey which so eiTectively do the work for which some 

 people pretend to keep cats. Again, it seems inconceivable that so many people, 

 who get more of the rapid-breeding cats than they want, will haul them out and 

 drop them along the road-side, there almost invariably to go hungry and cold 

 until they learn to catch the beautiful and valuable birds. It is cruel to treat cats 

 thus, while it would be humane to chloroform the surplus stock. This latter 

 procedure applied to the surplus stock and to any cats found eating poultry or 

 birds would very greatly lessen the enormous destruction of valuable birds. 



School teachers and their pupils can slowly but surely and permanently put 



an end to the destruction of valuable birds by teaching in every community the 



real benefits we derive from them. Many people believe that all birds of prey 



■ are bad, just because an occasional individual acquires a perverted appetite. No 



403 



