various other species being on his black list. The buzzards, 
once common, he had exterminated and was proud to tell it. 
I am ready to furnish particulars of this case to anyone 
who may desire to introduce into Parliament a bill for the 
abolition of this horrible instrument of torture and indiscriminate 
destruction. It is painful to think that so many of these useful and 
beautiful birds are annually destroyed accidentally by this means. 
There are land owners who do not tolerate the pole-trap, and are 
anxious to preserve their owls; unhappily they cannot prevent 
them from roaming into neighbouring estates where the trap is 
employed, and where the poor birds, held fast by their crushed 
legs, are doomed to perish miserably by slow degrees. For the 
bird must roam abroad by night, and when perching it invariably 
prefers a tall isolated pole to a tree. Half-a-dozen pole traps in 
use on one estate will keep down and even exterminate the owls 
inhabiting the country for many miles around. Richard Jefferies 
relates that in one instance no fewer than two hundred owls were 
taken in one pole-trap in a plantation of young fir trees (“ Red 
Deer,” p. 195). Until this abominable device has been abolished 
by Act of Parliament, little good will result from the feeling in 
favour of the barn owl which is now becoming so general, and 
from the efforts which some of the County Councils are making 
J 'j 
to give the bird protection. 
To return to the correspondents who ask for “some¬ 
thing about the owl.” It is surprising that at the present 
day anyone should think it necessary to write a fresh plea for 
this bird—a bird that has been a favourite of our ornithologists 
for the last hundred years, and whose praises may be read in 
a hundred volumes on our library shelves! The “ feathered 
cat,” or barn, or white, or church, or domestic owl, as he is 
variously called, has been minutely and lovingly described by all 
his biographers. “ He who destroys an owl is an encourager of 
mice,” says one writer; and his value as a mouse-killer and Ins 
beauty and singularity are points that are invariably dwelt upon. 
