180 NEW YORK ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 
hand, they will assume adult plumage either of a general bright 
rufous color, or else a brownish gray, being streaked with black 
in both phases. This description, together with the small size— 
about nine inches in length—and feather ears on the sides of the 
head, will serve for identification. 
There are few birds more trustful of man than the Screech Owl, 
coming often into the very streets of villages, and nesting there 
if they can find a suitable cavity, while upon the neighboring 
farms they are omnipresent. Everywhere it finds work ready to its 
talons and beak, work which no cunning of man could supplement, 
in ridding gardens and fields of mice and noxious insects. 
In the stomachs of two hundred and fifty owls from all parts 
of the country, the remains of mice and shrews were found 
in a hundred, while insects had formed the diet of a hundred more. 
Thirty-eight only had fed on small birds, and this item is of the 
greatest importance in this species, since, being the only owl 
which frequents our villages and even cities, it may prove of great 
importance in the future in keeping down the numbers of the 
pestiferous English sparrows. A gentleman from Ohio writes 
as follows concerning this latter bird: “Last summer they were so 
thick around my house as almost to set me wild, when a little 
screech owl got to visiting us every night, and at each visit he 
carried off a sparrow. My house is thickly covered with vines, 
and the little owl would make a dart into the vines and catch his 
sparrow every time. By fall they were well thinned out.” A 
Screech Owl should never be killed, but left to live his life of 
constant usefulness to mankind. 
The sedentary life of this species of owl, together with its 
plasticity of structure, doubtless explains the quick and radical 
reaction which it shows to various environments. In the United 
States alone there are no fewer than thirteen forms of the 
Screech Owl, all differing so much inter se, that they have been 
given specific or sub-specific rank. 
As we know nothing of the ancestry of these birds, it is 1mpos- 
sible to tell which are the most modified, and which approach 
most closely to the prototype. The Screech Owl as we know it in 
the east, remains unchanged as far south as Georgia, and west 
to Dakota and Kansas. In Florida and along the Gulf coast, the 
owls are smaller and darker, but west of the plains from Canada 
to Mexico we find as many as eleven different forms. This may 
mean that the Rocky Mountain region was the original center of 
distribution of this species, or it may reflect only the extremes 
