74 ICE-BOUND ON KOLGUEV 



necessary too for the health of these birds that natural 

 food of this sort should be given. When you see — as you 

 sometimes do see — a collection in which the birds of 

 prey are fed on plain horse-flesh or liver, you may feel 

 sure that they will not remain long in good health. 

 Examine these pellets every day to see whether all 

 meat has been properly digested, and you have at 

 once a simple key to the success of the regimen and the 

 bird's condition. But this is a digression. 



Now, some raptorial birds never let these pellets be 

 seen near the nest, but others are not so particular. Our 

 screech or barn owl leaves its mouse-bone and mouse- 

 fur pellets all about its nest, but our brown or tawny owl 

 either moves them away or is careful to eject them at a 

 distance. At any rate I have never seen any castings at 

 a tawny's nest. 



On the other hand, you will find reliable accounts of 

 peregrine's breeding places in which not only pellets 

 were seen but much old food, so that Yarrell says : ' The 

 presence of birds' bones in or around the nest seems to 

 be the rule, and upon the top of the cliffs near St. Abb's 

 Head, where Selby visited a nest, he noticed, scattered 

 in great profusion, the castings of the falcons.' 2 But it 

 is quite obvious that, in such an instance as this, the 

 young birds were hatched ; the food was for them, and 

 the castings were theirs. 



Just opposite the Russian cross the river, widening 



1 British Birds, 4th ed., i. 59. 



