The Barn Owl 
55 
Comical 
Owlets 
to the cross-timbers and there nailed two boards for a platform. Then 
we took the back out of the nest-box and fixed it so it would drop down 
and show the inside and afterward could be fastened up again. In this way 
we were able to get a picture of the four white eggs the nest contained. 
We did not want to disturb the owls unduly so waited for a month 
before our next visit there, and then, when I had 
climbed into the gable, I found three of the funniest, 
fuzziest, “monkey-faced” little creatures that I had 
ever set eyes on. They blinked, snapped their bills and hissed like a box 
full of snakes. They bobbed and screwed around in more funny attitudes 
in a minute than any contortionist you ever saw. They were graded in 
size and height like the steps of a staircase. 
We crept out one night and hid in a brush-heap by the barn. Before 
long the scratching and soft hissing of the young owls told us that their 
breakfast-time had come. The curtain of the night had fallen. The day- 
creatures were at rest. Suddenly a shadow passed across the dimly lit 
sky. The young owls in some way knew of the approach of food, for 
there was a sudden outcry in the nest-box like the whistle of escaping 
steam. Again and again the shadow came and went. Then I crept into 
the barn and felt my way up to the box. As soon as food was brought 
I struck a match, and saw one of the half-grown young tearing the 
head from the body of a young gopher. Ravenous 
Owls are always hungry. They will eat their own Nature 
weight in food every night, and more if they can get it. 
One half-grown owl was given all the mice it could eat. It swallowed 
eight one after another, and the ninth followed all but the tail, which for 
a time hung out of the bird’s mouth. In a few hours this same bird was 
ready for a second meal, and swallowed four more mice. 
To supply children as ravenous as that the parents ransack gar- 
dens, fields and orchards industriously, and catch as many mice, gophers 
and other ground-creatures as a dozen cats. For this reason it would 
be difficult to find birds that are more useful about any farming com- 
munity. Yet many persons kill these owls because of ignorance of their 
value, or from idle curiosity. 
The Barn Owl is not particular when he eats ; he puts his feet on his 
game to hold it, then tears it to pieces with his hooked beak, swallowing 
the entire animal, meat, bones, fur, and all. The nutritious parts are 
absorbed in the stomach and the indigestible matter is formed into round 
pellets and disgorged. About any owl’s roost or near Evidence 
its home one may often find these pellets in great from Pellets 
numbers, and a scientist, by examining them, can tell 
exactly what the bird has been eating, and make an estimate of the size 
and number of that owl’s meals. 
The best known record of this kind concerning food of the Barn 
Owl is that which was made from a pair that occupied one of the towers 
in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. Dr. A. K. Fisher, who 
