OCTOBER 247 



plague of field-voles, such as desolated great tracts of hill 

 pasture in southern Scotland in 1891 and 1892. In those 

 years the short-eared owls not only assembled in unusual 

 numbers upon the ground affected, but remained to breed 

 there. Nay, more. Not content with a single setting each 

 of four or five eggs, the females reared two and three 

 broods in a season, sometimes laying eight or nine eggs in 

 each setting. As chairman of a Departmental Committee 

 appointed to devise means of mitigating the vole plague, 

 it became my duty to visit several farms where the little 

 rodents were most numerous, and witnessed the owls doing 

 excellent service hawking about over the heather in the 

 month of June, and pouncing upon the darting voles. 

 When the vole plague abated in the third season, the owls 

 took to preying upon young grouse, but only as a make- 

 shift. They resumed their normal migratory habits, and 

 in the fourth season a man might have hunted Eskdale 

 moor the whole summer through and failed to see a 

 short-eared owl. The short-eared owl, therefore, must be 

 acquitted on the plea of alibi of destroying young game in 

 Britain. As for the night-hunting species — the long-eared 

 owl, the barn owl, the tawny owl, etc. — their defence is 

 complete. Young winged game is not abroad in the hours 

 of darkness, when they seek their prey. 



But now comes a totally different charge against one of 

 the most respected members of this ancient family. A 

 friend writes me from North Wales (1902) that the game- 

 keepers where he has been shooting attribute the unusual 

 scarcity of snipes this season to the malfeasance of long- 

 eared owls {Asio otua), and that in consequence the decree 

 has gone out for the utter destruction of these beautiful 

 birds. Now this charge is such a novel one that it 



