1028 



Feeding Habits of the Little Owl. 



[Feb., 



Depredations. — Numerous very serious charges have been made 

 against the Little Owl : thus a recent writer (1) states : " The 

 large amount of damage done by little owls to poultry and 

 game has set all the gamekeepers and many others against it." 



A large number of letters received from gamekeepers charge 

 this bird with the destruction of young pheasants, partridges 

 and fowls, also wild ducks and wood pigeons. Other corre- 

 spondents have recorded the presence in their " hoards " or 

 larders of the starling, blackbird, song-thrush, house-sparrow, 

 chaffinch, greenfinch, linnet, skylark, cuckoo, bank vole, long- 

 tailed field mouse, common shrew, rat, mole, rabbit, bat, snake 

 and frog. 



Some little time back this bird was reported to me as having 

 been seen to carry off young pheasants. This occurred so often 

 that the keeper shot the bird and sent it to me, but instead 

 of an owl it was a sparrow hawk. 



Mr. Meade- Waldo (12), who has paid considerable attention 

 to the food of Little Owls, writes: " They are very large 

 consumers of insects, beetles, earthworms, lizards, mice — 

 and during the time the young are being fed, kill a great many 

 birds. These consist almost entirely of young thrushes, black- 

 birds, mistle-thrushes, sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches, 

 some skylarks — just what one might expect; but the main point- 

 comes in the fact that, in all these years I have never 

 seen the remains of a single game-bird in a nest or ' hoard.' 

 Later he writes (In Hit., 3 x 20) : " We do not find them doing 

 any harm now. All their castings consist of insect remains, 

 beetles, etc. They hawk daddy longlegs, etc., all day and 

 also at night, and we none of us found the remains of any 

 young game birds in any nests that we carefully noted last 

 summer. ... I have had no complaints of chicken kill- 

 ing this year, and there are Little Owls in every farmstead." 



Dresser (8) quotes Mr. Robson as stating that in Turkey and 

 Asia Minor " It feeds much on the ground, principally sub- 

 sisting on small beetles," and again De La Fontaine, that in 

 Luxembourg " It feeds on small birds, mice and other small 

 rodents, moths maybugs, etc. It is undoubtedly a most useful 

 bird." 



Mr. J. H. Gurney (10) writes: " There seems to be a pre- 

 vailing prejudice against it, but the harm it does has been 

 greatly exaggerated, in spite of what numerous letters to 

 sporting papers may say to the contrary; at any rate, in the 



