WHITE, OR BARN OWL . — Strips Jldmmea. 
The Barn Owl is very common in England, residing in barns, hollow trees, 
or ruined buildings, often in company with jackdaws and starlings. It feeds 
almost entirely on mice, though it will sometimes eat little birds, and one Owl is 
more useful to the farmer than a hundred rat or mouse-traps, for it catches and 
eats the field-mice which will not come into houses, and cannot easily be decoyed 
into traps. 
In feeding its young families, of which it has two in each year, it consumes a 
vast number of these tiresome little animals. 
In the evening dusk, when the mice begin to stir abroad in search of a mole, 
the Owl starts in search of the mice, and with noiseless flight quarters the ground 
in a sportsmanlike and very regular manner, watching with its great round eyes 
every movement of a grass-blade, and catching with its sensitive ears every sound 
that issues from behind. Not a field-mouse can come within ken of the bird’s 
eye, or make the least rustling among the leaves within hearing of the Owl’s ear, 
that is not detected and captured. The claws are the instruments by which the 
Owl seizes its victim, and it does not employ the beak until it desires to devour 
the prey. 
Sometimes the Owl has been detected in robbing the pigeons’ nests of their 
young ; but such conduct seems to be very rare, as there are many instances 
on record where the Owl has actually inhabited the same cote with the pigeons 
without touching their young or disturbing the peace of the parents. This Owl 
is also an experienced fisher, and has been seen to drop quietly upon the water 
and return to its nest bearing in its claws a perch which it had captured. 
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