26 THE BARN OWL 



The Barn or White Owl is generally distributed 

 throughout Great Britain. It suffered at one time most 

 undeservedly from the ignorant prejudices of many 

 gamekeepers, and of late years from the senseless fashion 

 of women wearing the wings and head in their headgear 

 a crowning folly only perpetrated through that 

 ignorant vanity which knows neither love nor pity. 



Colonel Irby said that this Owl, which is most useful 

 to man, can be preserved and increased by fixing an 

 i8-gallon cask in a tree. The barrel should be placed 

 on its side and have a hole cut in the upper part of the 

 head for the Owls to enter ; care must, however, be taken 

 that Jackdaws do not take possession of the cask. 



Our gamekeepers are beginning now to be convince^ 

 of the usefulness of the Owl, especially in view of the 

 fact that so many young birds are taken by the Brown 

 Rat, a favourite quarry with the Owl not to speak of 

 the Voles and Mice the bird devours. The late Lord 

 Lilford told me that he had watched a nest of young 

 Owls being fed by their parents in an old cedar tree in 

 the rectory garden of a relative, and that on one occasion 

 the old birds came bringing food to these seventeen 

 times in half an hour by the clock, on that evening. 

 There was a rickyard not far from the nest which was 

 the Owls' favourite hunting-ground. Mice were not 

 plentiful there, but rats swarmed, and the pellets found 

 under the nest were here composed almost entirely of 

 the remains of the latter. In the South of France 

 and in Spain this Owl is accused of drinking oil from 

 lamps in the peasants' houses and in the churches and 

 chapels. The name given to it in the former country by 

 the peasant of the Midi is Beou I'oli bird that drinks 

 oil. Attracted by the light of the lamps, the poor Owl 



