BIRDS OF THE NIGHT 207 



eat. One day a member of the family brought 

 in a downy duckling that had met with an 

 untimely end, and thinking it would be a treat 

 for Hooter, offered it to him. He took the 

 corpse, held it in one foot and studied it care- 

 fully, nipping it here and there as if to see what 

 it was made of, but evidently the flavour of the 

 woolly down did not appeal to him. At this 

 point I was called away, and did not learn 

 until some time afterwards what had happened. 

 Hooter evidently carried it off upstairs, to be 

 stored away for future sampling. I must explain 

 that he always " lardered " anything he did not 

 want to eat immediately, but hitherto he had 

 never forgotten his hidden treasures, always 

 returning to them and eating them up. His 

 favourite larder was on the top of a tall piece of 

 furniture in my father's dressing-room. Well, 

 the episode of the duckling was forgotten, until 

 some ten days later a most vile smell became 

 apparent in this room. At first no one could 

 think of what could be causing it, then I remembered 

 Hooter's larder, and hastily got a pair of step- 

 ladders to look on the top of the wardrobe 

 as the housemaid graphically expressed it, " the 

 duckling was walking ! " The " powers that 

 be " made a great commotion over this incident, 

 threatening to there and then eject the owl 

 from the house, and he was only allowed to 

 remain on condition that I made a regular and 

 careful search of all his larders. 



I have no evidence that owls in a wild state 



