July, 1905 | 
97 
Scraps from an Owl Table 
BY VERNON BAILEY 
A pair of great horned owls raised their young in a niche near the top of a 
cliff, at the western base of the Davis Mountains, Texas, in the summer of 
1902, but when I found the nest on August 12 it was empty. I learned at 
the ranch just around the corner of the cliff that one of the old owls had been 
killed a short time before my arrival and that several loads of shot had been fired 
at other members of the family for fear they might catch the chickens. There 
were at least two of the young owls which were full grown and strong fliers, for I 
often scared them out of the dark niches or little caves in the neighboring cliffs 
during the day, but they evidently lacked experience in catching their own meat, 
for their nightly screams from cliff and fence post had a hungry insistence. It 
would have kept one old bird hustling to feed the family, even in this open, half 
desert country of abundant small game had the youngsters done no hunting for 
themselves, but they were trying to make an honest living, judging by their pro- 
longed screams from the fence posts down by the alfalfa patch. 
But for the point of my story I must return to the nest, or to the ground at 
the base of the cliff forty feet below the old nest cave. There were a few pellets, 
a quantity of disintegrated pellet material, and nearly a bushel, at a rough esti- 
mate, of small bones scattered over the ground. Much of the material had been 
washed down the steep slope and mixed with the stones and earth and lost, but 
enough remained to show what had been the principal food of the family during 
the spring and earl}' summer. 
For an hour I dug in this debris, picking out parts of bones that I could recog- 
nize or that could be identified later, and making a rough census of the contents of 
the mass. Identifications and estimates of numbers were based mainly on skulls or 
parts of skulls with teeth, and in most cases were not difficult. The most abundant 
bones were those of the cottontail (Lcpusa. minor ) of which I recognized parts of fully 
100 skulls. A few jack rabbit jaws and teeth were found, but mostly those of young 
or half grown animals. Skulls or parts of skulls of about twenty pocket gophers 
( Cratogeomys castanops) were found. Two species of wood rats ( Neotoma micropus') 
and albigula) and the large kangaroo rat ( Dipodomys spcctabiiis) were well repre- 
sented by broken skulls. There were a few pocket mice (Per ogoia thus), including 
two species. White-footed and grasshopper mice ( Peromyscus and Onychomys) 
skulls were common, and I found jaws of two little spotted skunks (Spilogale) and 
skulls of two bats. Bones of horned toads and snakes were common and the legs 
and shells of beetles, grasshoppers, and various insects were abundant in the mass. 
I found one sternum of a bird the size of a meadowlark and one lower mandible 
that was probably from a chicken. 
The ranch was typical of the west Texas cattle country, stretching down from 
the base of the mountains over beautiful grassy slopes to the next ranch six miles 
below T . There was not even a garden, but a small peach orchard loaded with fine 
fruit surrounded the windmill pond, and about three acres of alfalfa just below the 
pond yielded one or two crops a year. The pocket gophers were common in both 
peach orchard and alfalfa patch but I could find none on the drier upland. But 
for the owls it is doubtful if either peach trees or alfalfa would ever have yielded a 
crop, while mice, rats, and rabbits would have been present in troublesome abundance. 
The ranchman admitted that only one or two chickens had disappeared dur- 
ing the summer, but even then he could not get over the idea that owls lived on 
chickens and were his enemies. 
Washington, 1 ). C. 
