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Birds and All Nature, Vol. V, No 5, May 1899

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<h2>THE OWLS' SANCTUARY.</h2> PROF. HENRY C. MERCER. SEVEN bluish-white, almost spherical eggs, resting on the plaster floor of the court-house garret, at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, caught the eye of the janitor, Mr. Bigell, as one day last August he had entered the dark region by way of a wooden wicket from the tower. Because the court-house pigeons, whose nestlings he then hunted, had made the garret a breeding-place for years, he fancied he had found another nest of his domestic birds. But the eggs were too large, and their excessive number puzzled him, until some weeks later, visiting the place again (probably on the morning of September 20), he found that all the eggs save one had hatched into owlets, not pigeons. The curious hissing creatures, two of which seemed to have had a week's start in growth, while one almost feather-less appeared freshly hatched, sat huddled together where the eggs had lain, close against the north wall and by the side of one of the cornice loop-holes left by the architect for ventilating the garret. Round about the young birds were scattered a dozen or more carcasses of mice (possibly a mole or two), some of them freshly killed, and it was this fact that first suggested to Mr. Bigell the thought of the destruction of his pigeons by the parent owls, who had thus established themselves in the midst of the latter's colony. But no squab was ever missed from the neighboring nests, and no sign of the death of any of the other feathered tenants of the garret at any time rewarded a search. As the janitor stood looking at the nestlings for the first time, a very large parent bird came in the loop-hole, fluttered near him and went out, to return and again fly away, leaving him to wonder at the staring, brown-eyed, monkey-faced creatures before him. Mr. Bigell had thus found the rare nest of the barn owl, Strix pratincola, a habitation which Alexander Wilson, the celebrated ornithologist, had never discovered, and which had eluded the search of the author of "Birds of Pennsylvania." One of the most interesting of American owls, and of all, perhaps, the farmer's best friend, had established its home and ventured to rear its young, this time not in some deserted barn of Nockamixon swamp, or ancient hollow tree of Haycock mountain, but in the garret of the most public building of Doylestown, in the midst of the county's capital itself. When the janitor had left the place and told the news to his friends, the dark garret soon became a resort for the curious, and two interesting facts in connection with the coming of the barn owls were manifest; first, that the birds, which by nature nest in March, were here nesting entirely out of season—strange to say, about five months behind time; from which it might be inferred that the owls' previous nests of the year had been destroyed, and their love-making broken up in the usual way; the way, for instance, illustrated by the act of any one of a dozen well remembered boys who, like the writer, had "collected eggs;" by the habitude of any one of a list of present friends whose interest in animals has not gone beyond the desire to possess them in perpetual captivity and watch their sad existence through the bars of a cage; or by the "science" of any one of several scientific colleagues who, hunting specimens for the sake of a show-case, "take" the female to investigate its stomach. Beyond the extraordinary nesting date, it had been originally noticed that the mother of the owlets was not alone, four or five other barn owls having first come to the court-house with her. Driven by no one knew what fate, the strange band had appeared to appeal, as if in a body, to the protection of man. They had placed themselves at his mercy as a bobolink when storm driven far from shore lights upon a ship's mast. But it seemed, in the case of the owls, [Pg 224] no heart was touched. The human reception was that which I have known the snowy heron to receive, when, wandering from its southern home, it alights for awhile to cast its fair shadow upon the mirror of the Neshaminy, or such as that which, not many years ago, met the unfortunate deer which had escaped from a northern park to seek refuge in Bucks County woods. At first it trusted humanity; at last it fled in terror from the hue and cry of men in buggies and on horseback, of enemies with dogs and guns, who pursued it till strength failed and its blood dyed the grass. So the guns of humanity were loaded for the owls. The birds were too strange, too interesting, too wonderful to live. The court house was no sanctuary. Late one August night one fell at a gun shot on the grass at the poplar trees. Then another on the pavement by the fountain. Another, driven from its fellows, pursued in mid air by two crows, perished of a shot wound by the steps of a farm-house, whose acres it could have rid of field mice. The word went out in Doylestown that the owls were a nuisance. But we visited them and studied their ways, cries, and food, to find that they were not a nuisance in their town sanctuary. In twenty of the undigested pellets, characteristic of owls, left by them around the young birds, we found only the remains, as identified by Mr. S. N. Rhoads of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, of the bones, skulls, and hair of the field mouse (Microtus pennsylvanicus) and star nose mole (Condylura cristata). "They killed the pigeons," said someone, speaking without authority, after the manner of a gossip who takes away the character of a neighbor without proof. But they had not killed the pigeons. About twelve pairs of the latter, dwelling continually with their squabs in the garret, though they had not moved out of the particular alcove appropriated by the owls, had not been disturbed. What better proof could be asked that THE BARN OWL IS NOT A POULTRY DESTROYER? It was objected that the owls' cries kept citizens awake at night. But when, one night last week, we heard one of their low, rattling cries, scarcely louder than the note of a katydid, and learned that the janitor had never heard the birds hoot, and that the purring and hissing of the feeding birds in the garret begins about sundown and ceases in the course of an hour, we could not believe that the sleep of any citizen ever is or has been so disturbed. When I saw the three little white creatures yesterday in the court-house garret, making their strange bows as the candle light dazzled them, hissing with a noise as of escaping steam, as their brown eyes glowed, seemingly through dark-rimmed, heart-shaped masks, and as they bravely darted towards me when I came too near, I learned that one of the young had disappeared and that but one of the parent birds is left, the mother, who will not desert her offspring. On October 28 two young birds were taken from their relatives to live henceforth in captivity, and it may be that two members of the same persecuted band turned from the town and flew away to build the much-talked-of nest in a hollow apple tree at Mechanics' Valley. If so, there again the untaught boy, agent of the mother that never thought, the Sunday school that never taught, and the minister of the Gospel that never spoke, was the relentless enemy of the rare, beautiful, and harmless birds. If he failed to shoot the parents, he climbed the tree and caught the young. If the hostility to the owls of the court house were to stop, if the caged birds were to be put back with their relatives, if the nocturnal gunners were to relent, would the remaining birds continue to add an interest to the public buildings by remaining there for the future as the guests of the town? Would the citizens of Doylestown, by degrees, become interested in the pathetic fact of the birds' presence, and grow proud of their remarkable choice of sanctuary, as Dutch towns are proud of their storks? To us, the answer to these questions, with its hope of enlightenment, seems to lie in the hands of the mothers, of the teachers of Sunday schools, and of the ministers. <hr class="chap" /> [Pg 226] <table class="sp2 mc w50" title="GRINNELL'S WATER THRUSH." summary="GRINNELL'S WATER THRUSH."> <tbody> <tr> <td colspan="3"> <ANTIMG style="width:100%" src="images/i_063.jpg" width="600" height="447" alt="" /> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="xx-smaller ac w30">FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES. 5-99</td> <td class="x-smaller ac w40">GRINNELL'S WATER THRUSH. Life-size.</td> <td class="xx-smaller ac w30">COPYRIGHT 1899, NATURE STUDY PUB. CO., CHICAGO.</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> [Pg 227] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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