Ule, the 
Little Owl. 
(143) THE BIRD WORLD. 
worms, and grew stronger and stronger 
every day, and when he had moulted 
his baby coat and was fully fledged, 
he could face the world without fear. 
He had but few enemies, for he and 
all his relations were held free by the 
master of the lands on which they lived, 
but he was sometimes very badly mobbed 
by flocks of small birds, who, in the 
autumn, after their summer duties were 
over, and the hardships of winter not 
yet come, moved about in flocks, ac¬ 
companied by their youngsters, and 
whenever one of their enemies, be it 
hawk or owl, was in sight, they seemed 
to think that it was their duty to hustle 
and worry him away with as much noise 
as possible. 
Not Afraid of the Sun. 
Now Ule, with all his family, un¬ 
like the other Owls, had no fear of the 
brightest sunlight, and so he was more 
easily seen by the flocks of small birds; 
one day especially, he was worried from 
tree to tree along the river banks until 
he came to one with a hollow trunk, 
into which he dropped and waited until 
the flock of tormentors had passed by. 
He could, of course, have caught and 
killed one of the birds, but he was too 
bothered by their numbers to think of 
that. 
As the winter came on, he wandered 
away from his early home, partly be¬ 
cause he felt it good to do so, but more 
because his parents would not have any 
more of him, and drove him out into 
the world. He did not mind, life was 
as yet easy to him, for food was plenti¬ 
ful, and he cared for nothing more, so 
he wandered far and wide, often getting 
many miles away. 
About Christmas time, a terrible 
storm of snow and hail came on and 
held, more or less, for three whole 
days; this was bad for Ule, who could 
do nothing but sit in the hollow of a 
tree in shelter waiting as patiently as 
possible for the storm to pass away. 
As soon as it cleared, he was out hunt¬ 
ing again, but he did not understand 
the white world around him, but he 
met another Owl who had passed 
through several winters, and who knew 
how this white world sometimes came 
between the autumn moult and the spring 
breeding time, but always passed away 
again. His new-found friend taught 
Ule how, when the ground was snow- 
covered, to catch birds by taking them 
from their perches in the hedge at dusk, 
and also how to watch for the small 
field mice as they ran across the snow. 
Strange Voices Calling. 
Ule’s first year of life had been some¬ 
what uneventful, but when the winter 
was over and he began to wander farther 
afield again, life , seemed to hold more 
for him, for soon the budding of spring 
began to show everywhere, and Ule had 
strange voices calling upon him to get 
a mate. As he flew ‘from tree to tree, 
or sat upon a railing or a post, he would 
call “ peu-peu-u-ii ” in long-drawn notes, 
hoping to hear an answering call, which 
for a long time never came, for he had 
wandered far away from where the birds 
of his kind lived. 
He did not know that the only little 
Owls on the whole countryside were 
those whose parents had been freed in 
the same park as his own; and that few 
had wandered so far as he, who had 
travelled quite twenty miles from his old 
home. After some days of wandering 
and calling, with one or two narrow 
escapes from being shot, he heard an 
answering call, and to his joy found 
it was the same bird he had met at the 
beginning of the winter. 
They made much of each other, for 
both had wandered far away from their 
friends, but the country they were in 
was very like where they were born, 
except, that instead of a river running 
through it, there was a fine pool stretch¬ 
ing some mile or more in front of them, 
with old timber just suited to their 
habits growing round in great profusion. 
They did not know at first the danger 
they were in, for in their new home, 
instead of being protected, they were 
pursued by every boy who saw them, 
and shot at by every man; for they 
were rarities, and so, of course, in ac¬ 
cordance with the universal law of 
