HAWKS AND OWLS. 31 
“unlucky,” to hear its hoot very unlucky indeed, and 
the bird is almost as much feared by the rustic 
mind as in the days when it was looked upon as 
the chosen attendant of witches and wizards, with 
their fearsome following, and the incarnation and 
concentration of all that was evil and unhallowed. 
The screech-owl, screeching loud, 
Puts the wretch that lies in woe 
In remembrance of a shroud. 
So wrote Shakespeare three hundred years ago, and 
so, with almost equal truth, might be written now, 
for even yet the harmless and useful owl is looked 
upon by the lower classes more as an emissary from 
the powers of darkness than as a kind of nocturnal 
hawk, taking up by night the work which the kestrel 
carries on by day. 
It is really a difficult matter to say which is the 
more valuable bird of the two. We have already seen 
how untiring is the combat which the kestrel wages 
against the smaller rodents, but the owl, perhaps, has 
even greater opportunities, and no one can assert that 
it fails to make use of them. Waterton tells us, in 
one of his celebrated essays, that, during the nesting 
season, the barn-owl brings a mouse to its young 
every twelve or fifteen minutes. Also that every 
pellet rejected by the bird contains the skeletons of 
from four to seven mice, and that, in the course of 
sixteen months, no less than a bushel of such pellets 
were taken from the abode of a single pair of owls. 
And evidence with regard to the barn-owl is, for a 
wonder, strikingly unanimous. It is persecuted, no 
D 
