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Plumage of upper-parts a tawny yellow, mottled, speckled, and pencilled with delicate grey, black and white; face white, as are the under-parts; individuals vary in being lighter or darker; buffish-white on chest, feet pinkish, beak yellowish. Entire length, 13·5 inches.

EITHER of the two last English names are perhaps in this case more suitable than the first, as barns in Egypt are scarce, whilst this owl is common, and is met with in temples and tombs fairly frequently.

In the past it must always have been a common bird, as it is one of the few quite easily identified birds used in hieroglyphics (in spite of which, to my astonishment, in a recent work on Egypt this owl is called the Horned Owl).

The Barn Owl has practically a world-wide range, being found not only in Europe but Africa, Asia, Australia, and America, and though examples from certain localities do show some variation in plumage, it is still always unmistakably the Barn Owl. It

BARN-OWL

is, however, not met with within the Arctic Circle. At home its food is nearly entirely mice, but in Egypt it has no hedgerows to hunt, no large farmyards and rich granaries, and though it does get some mice it has to take lizards, an occasional small bird, and sometimes fish, or even scraps of carrion.

Of all the owls this has the softest, most silent flight, and this in itself is somewhat uncanny as it quite quietly passes close to you, and then disappears in the gloom, from which a little later may come a terrifying screech as of a strangled infant. There is little room for wonder, then, that all simple folk should have regarded this bird as evil-omened: and the old Scriptures have many references in this spirit when describing places haunted, desolated, the “abode of owls and dragons.” To this day, in our own country, the feeling is evinced most strangely in spite of all our modern education. Very cleverly the early Egyptians caught the most salient feature—the extraordinary large mask-like face—and in some of the wall decorations at Deir-el-Bahari, which are in perfect preservation, it would be well-nigh impossible to improve on them as exact portraits of the Barn Owl. A possible cause of the choice of this bird is that it is one of the best-known species: for of all the owls this one is quite peculiar in its habit of rather courting than flying from the haunts of man; for though it is in the ruins of temples it is also to be found in the thick foliage near villages and towns, and has even been noticed flying about in the very heart of Cairo in the Ezbekeir Gardens, as recorded by Mr. J. H. Gurney in his Rambles of a Naturalist—and the habit of attaching itself to human habitations is universal wherever it is met the world round.

The Barn Owl has a custom which those who suffer from indigestion may well envy, and that is its power of disgorging, after every meal, all the indigestible portions of its dinner in a compact, round, hard pellet, about the size of a nut: and from under some of its roosting-places great basketsfull of these pellets have been collected, and men of science analyzing these have obtained therefrom the most precise information as to the diet of this much-persecuted bird. From such observations the value of its services in our own country were rather tardily recognised. But now that it is established that nine-tenths of its food consists of mice and rats, the law of the land has been invoked to protect it. Lord Lilford writes on the extraordinary appetite of young owls, that “I have seen a young Barn Owl take down nine full-grown mice one after another till the tail of the ninth stuck out of his mouth, and in three hours’ time the young ‘gourmand’ was crying out for more.”

Fig. 6. From Deir-el-Bahari.