6 FARM VERMIN, HELPFUL AND HURTFUL. 



latter have disappeared it is reported that the owls have 

 begun to attack young game. 



Nevertheless, as this is quite an exceptional excess on the 

 part of these useful birds, it ought not to be reckoned 

 against them. Owls will not remain where there are no 

 mice, any more than swallows where there are no flies. 

 When the mice are finished owls will support life for a 

 time on anything they can catch, but they will soon take 

 their departure, and farmers ought to stipulate with their 

 landlords that gamekeepers be forbidden to destroy them. 

 In doing so they will have science on their side. It is 

 only crass ignorance that directs the destruction of all 

 birds of prey as vermin, the less pardonable because such 

 birds afford evidence of their diet in a peculiar way. Hawks 

 and owls swallow feathers, fur, and bones with the flesh, 

 and cast them up again in the form of what are called 

 ^* pelts," or pellets." The Vole Committee inspected the 

 farm of Howpasley, near Hawick, which had been visited 

 severely by the scourge. A small wood at the back of the 

 dwelling-house was resorted to by large numbers of owls, 

 and the ground under the trees was literally covered w^ith 

 thousands of pellets composed of the fur and bones of the 

 voles. Not many years since, tut before the last outbreak 

 of voles in Scotland, a German naturalist, Dr. Altumi, w^as 

 at the pains of examining the disgorged pellets of the wild 

 birds of prey, and the facts revealed by him should at once 

 and for ever have removed the doubts as to the usefulness of 

 owls. The Tawny Owl {Syrniuni aJuco) is the species that 

 bears the worst character for poaching. In two hundred 

 and ten pellets of this bird Dr. x\ltum found the remains of 

 one stoat, three hundred and seventy-one mice, forty moles, 

 eighteen small birds, and many beetles and cockroaches. 

 Again, seven hundred and six pelts of the common white or 

 barn-owl produced sixteen bats, three rats, two thousand 

 five hundred and twenty mice, one mole, and twenty-two 



