42 Birds of Buzzard's Roost 



Some years ago when we first went to Somerleaze to spend 

 our summers, I constructed a rustic seat around a hop-horn- 

 beam tree which stood upon the front lawn. I spent many 

 evenings under this tree, giving attention to the things that 

 were in flight at night. Across our neighbor's fields to the 

 northwest was a thickly wooded marsh and there I would first 

 hear the call of one of these owls, "to-hoot, to-hoot, to-hoo, to- 

 hoo-ah." Gradually it would come nearer. Presently it could 

 be heard from the great cup or burr oak just west of the farm 

 house, and then from the wood lot just southeast of it. In the 

 solemn quiet of the night in the country his hoot was anything 

 but cheering. Years have passed, the marsh has been convert- 

 ed into a cornfield, the hop-hornbeam, not used to the open, 

 died, and the call of the hoot owl is seldom heard from the 

 porch where I now spend my summer evenings listening to 

 "the insect orchestra shrilling out its twilight overture" and 

 the whip-poor-wills and screech owls. The dense woods at 

 Buzzard's Roost is a favorite place for these owls, and quite 

 frequently one of them alights on the ridge board of the cot- 

 tage at night and favors the gardener with his "to-hoot, to- 

 hoot, to-hoo, to-hoo-ah." 



These birds do much good and should be protected. They 

 are great destroyers of rodents, such as gophers, ground squir- 

 rels, rabbits, muskrats, house rats and mice and the larger 

 moths, beetles and grasshoppers. What they eat is determined 

 easily because of the fact that they do not masticate their food 

 but swallow it whole or in large shreds. In the process of di- 

 gestion that which is indigestible is regurgitated in pellets. 

 Gilbert White of Selborne, an English clergyman and natural- 

 ist of the eighteenth century, directed the attention of the pub- 

 lic to this fact. Near by the parish house stood a tree with 

 a cavity in which lived a pair of owls. He noticed at the roots 

 of this tree a large quantity of pellets which had been regur- 

 gitated by the owls. He made a careful examination of them 

 and discovered that the owls had destroyed large numbers of 

 mice and other rodents. Since then his observations have been 

 confirmed by many scientists. In the city of Washington two 

 hundred pellets were taken from beneath the nest of an owl 

 and examined and found to contain 454 skulls, of which 225 



