42 
The Screech Owl 
Nocturnal 
Habits 
Tremulous 
Call 
yet they have no difficulty in seeing in the daytime, although then they 
are not alert and wide-awake, as they are after sundown, nor are their 
voices heard. 
During the daytime they hide in holes in trees, or in some secluded 
place in the foliage, to escape observation. Should they be discovered 
they are likely to be mobbed by other birds, especially Blue Jays. This 
fact must have been well known to the ancients, for 
Aristotle recorded it three centuries before the 
beginning of the Christian era, in the following words 
which referred to the common Little Owl of Greece : 
“The Noctuse, and the rest, which cannot see by day, obtain their food 
by seeking it at night ; and yet they do not do this all night long, only at 
eventide and dawn. They hunt, moreover, mice, lizards and scorpions, 
and small beasts of the like kind. All other birds flock around the Noctua, 
or, as men say, admire, and, flying at it, buffet it. Wherefore, this being 
its nature, fowlers catch with it many and different kinds of little birds.” 
Owls are supposed by many superstitious people to be birds of bad 
omen ; this probably arises in the case of the Screech Owl from its weird, 
tremulous, shivering, wailing, yet melodious note, which has given it the 
name Shivering Owl in some places. To me there is a singular and 
fascinating attraction in its notes, which are heard in the dusk of early 
nightfall, and especially when its shadowy form is j 
noiselessly flitting by like a huge, night-flying moth, 
to be seen only as it crosses a background of fading j 
western light — a ghostly suggestion of night and solitude. 
While the life-history of the Screech Owl is interesting, yet its eco- 
nomic status is the important fact which needs wide publicity. All ij 
scientific students of the food-habits of this species of owl join in pro- I 
nouncing it to be one of the most beneficial and least harmful of birds. | 
In addition to the great number of rodents it destroys, it eats enormous | 
quantities of noxious insects. In the First Annual Report of the United 1 
States Entomological Commission (1877) it is stated that the injury by j 
the Rocky Mountains locust to agriculture west of the Mississippi had 1 
been so great during the years 1873-1876, that the evil had assumed I 
national importance. On page 119 of the report it is shown that in the 
four corn-growing States, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri, the loss 
by locusts in 1874 was 142,942,800 bushels, with a money-value, at 28 
cents per bushel, of $40,000,000. An examination of the contents of 
the stomachs of eight Screech Oiwls, taken at that time in Nebraska, 
disclosed the fact that the birds had eaten, just prior 
to their capture, 219 locusts and 247 other insects, 
besides two mice ; one had eaten a small bird, but it 
had also eaten 32 locusts and eight other insects. 
George C. Jones, of Fairfield County, Connecticut, says: “I think j 
the smaller species of owl feed upon the cutworm to some extent. I have 
found them in the stomach of the common Screech Owl. The fact that 
both cutworms and owls are nocturnal leads me to believe that owls, of 
Statistics 
of Service 
