FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH 67 



death, had kept her supplied with mice and rats, 

 several of which, quite recently killed, I found 

 therein and also stored in the hedge below. 



There is no rule about nidification without an 

 exception, and I have found a brown owl's eggs in 

 two places so unusual as to be worth mentioning 

 one in the fork of a Scotch fir in Saver's Wood, a few 

 feet from the ground, with hardly flat space enough 

 to hold the round eggs themselves ; the other, in a 

 rabbit-hole in Knight on Wood, a few miles away. 

 The food of the brown owl consists, in the main, of 

 rats and mice and the larger insects ; but game- 

 keepers wage an unrelenting war upon him, because, 

 as they assert, he, once in a way, takes a rabbit, a 

 leveret, or a young pheasant. It is difficult to 

 prove a negative, especially in the case of a bird 

 which captures its prey by night ; but young 

 pheasants, till they can perch and take fair care of 

 themselves, are pretty safe beneath their mothers' or 

 their foster-mothers' wings, and the evidence of the 

 pellets goes quite the other way. In any case, the 

 amount of good he does, even from a gamekeeper's 

 narrow field of vision, immensely outweighs the 

 harm. He falls only too easy a prey. His loud 

 hoot constantly proclaims his presence, and a good 

 imitation of it by the keeper's practised lips will 



