1 76 MY NATURE NOTEBOOK. 



human face peeps in. The owl might have stood 

 the uproar of the birds indefinitely, but your face is 

 another matter. It is no use trying to look sympa- 

 thetic and retiring discreetly. The owl perhaps 

 regards you as a bigger owl than himself, judging 

 by your face, and with one whiff of his wings he is 

 off, with the whole mob of small birds after him, 

 except the robin, who gets up on a conspicuous 

 branch and sings a song of victory. 



DRIVING OFF THE YOUNG. 



The habit of the brown owl, and of many other 

 birds, to drive away their young just when the hard 

 time of winter is coming, was a puzzle to the earlier 

 naturalists. Yet its meaning is very simple. Birds 

 which live all the year round upon a limited area 

 cannot afford to have a whole tribe of descendants 

 settled upon the same spot, else in winter they would 

 all starve. So they drive off their young in autumn, 

 when there is yet time for these to migrate to other 

 lands, if need be, or at any rate to find unoccupied 

 room for themselves elsewhere. Migratory birds, on 

 the other hand, permit their young to accompany 

 them in search of the plenty which awaits them all 

 in the distant South ; and they only exhibit animosity 

 against their children in the following spring, if their 

 breeding-haunts are such as might be depleted of 

 food by too many families in one place. Thus, 

 although sea birds, which have the inexhaustible sea 

 for feeding-ground, seem tolerant of any amount of 

 overcrowding, birds which breed and feed on inland 

 waters of limited size, such as moorhens and mallards, 



