THE OWLS' SANCTUARY. 



PROF. HENRY C. MERCER. 



SEVEN bluish-white, almost spher- 

 ical eggs, resting on the plaster 

 floor of the court-house garret, 

 at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 

 caught the eye of the janitor, Mr. 

 Bigell, as one day last August he had 

 entered the dark region by way of a 

 wooden wicket from the tower. Be- 

 cause the court-house pigeons, whose 

 nestlings he then hunted, had made 

 the garret a breeding-place for years, 

 he fancied he had found another nest 

 of his domestic birds. But the eggs 

 were too large, and their excessive 

 number puzzled him, until some weeks 

 later, visiting the place again (probably 

 on the morning of September 20), he 

 found that all the eggs save one had 

 hatched into owlets, not pigeons. 



The curious hissing creatures, two of 

 which seemed to have had a week's start 

 in growth, while one almost feather- 

 less appeared freshly hatched, sat hud- 

 dled together where the eggs had lain, 

 close against the north wall and by the 

 side of one of the cornice loop-holes 

 left by the architect for ventilating the 

 garret. Round about the young birds 

 were scattered a dozen or more car- 

 casses of mice (possibly a mole or 

 two), some of them freshly killed, and it 

 was this fact that first suggested to Mr. 

 Bigell the thought of the destruction 

 of his pigeons by the parent owls, who 

 had thus established themselves in the 

 midst of the latter's colony. But no 

 squab was ever missed from the neigh- 

 boring nests, and no sign of the death 

 of any of the other feathered tenants 

 of the garret at any time rewarded a 

 search. 



As the janitor stood looking at the 

 nestlings for the first time, a very large 

 parent bird came in the loophole, flut- 

 tered near him and went out, to return 

 and again fly away, leaving him to 

 wonder at the staring, brown-eyed, 

 monkey-faced creatures before him. 

 Mr. Bigell had thus found the rare nest 

 of the barn owl, Strix pratiyicola , a hab- 

 itation which Alexander Wilson, the 

 celebrated ornithologist, had never dis- 



covered, and which had eluded the 

 search of the author of " Birds of 

 Pennsylvania." One of the most in- 

 teresting of American owls, and of all, 

 perhaps, the farmer's best friend, had 

 established its home and ventured to 

 rear its young, this time not in some 

 deserted barn of Nockamixon swamp, 

 or ancient hollow tree of Haycock 

 mountain, but in the garret of the most 

 public building of Doylestown, in the 

 midst of the county's capital itself. 

 When the janitor had left the place and 

 told the news to his friends, the dark 

 garret soon became a resort for the 

 curious, and two interesting facts in 

 connection with the coming of the 

 barn owls were manifest; first, that the 

 birds, which by nature nest in March, 

 were here nesting entirely out of sea- 

 son — strange to say, about five months 

 behind time; from which it might be 

 inferred that the owls' previous nests 

 of the year had been destroyed, and 

 their love-making broken up in the 

 usual way; the way, for instance, illus- 

 trated by the act of any one of a dozen 

 well remembered boys who, like the 

 writer, had "collected eggs;" by the 

 habitude of any one of a list of pres- 

 ent friends whose interest in animals 

 has not gone beyond the desire to pos- 

 sess them in perpetual captivity and 

 watch their sad existence through the 

 bars of a cage; or by the " science" of 

 any one of several scientific colleagues 

 who, hunting specimens for the sake of 

 a show-case, "take" the female to in- 

 vestigate its stomach. 



Beyond the extraordinary nesting 

 date, it had been originally noticed 

 that the mother of the owlets was not 

 alone, four or five other barn owls hav- 

 ing first come to the court-house with 

 her. Driven by no one knew what fate, 

 the strange band had appeared to ap- 

 peal, as if in a body, to the 

 protection of man. They had placed 

 themselves at his mercy as a bobolink 

 when storm driven far from shore 

 lights upon a ship's mast. 



But it seemed, in the case of the owls. 



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