154 THE BIRDS OF ESSEX.
Order STRIGES.
Family STRIGIDAE.
Barn Owl: Strix flammea. Locally, "White Owl," "Grey
Owl," "Billy Owl," and "Willy."
A fairly-common resident, breeding in old hollow trees, church
towers, dove-cotes, &c. I often hear them after dark near Chelmsford.
No bird more richly deserves protection
than this. It feeds almost entirely
upon mice, shrews, and young rats,
and rarely touches birds of any kind
—a fact for which I can vouch, having
paid much attention to the point.
Albin says (3. ii. 11) that the specimen he
figures was met with " in a field near Waltham
Abbey, in the dusk of the evening, flying up
and down, and now and then catching at the
grass." He adds: "I desired my son, who
was with me, to shoot him, and when we dis-
sected him I found in his stomach several of
the White Grass-moths and other insects."
Mr. Buxton says (47. 83) : " I used to hear
this bird nightly twenty years ago in Lord's
Bushes, the old hollow trees of which it fre- 
barn owl, 1/6. quented. I am sorry to say it has disappeared
from that locality." Mr. Grubb speaks of it (39) as "an almost constant resi-
dent " at Sudbury. They have for some years nested in the large disused railway
sheds at Dagenham. The Rev. J. C. Atkinson writes (36. 43) :—
" My most familiar boy-acquaintance, however, was with the nesting-place
and habits of a pair which nested for many consecutive years in a slight hollow in
the crown of a large pollard elm tree in my father's churchyard [at Layer Marney]
in Essex. There were usually three or four young ones year by year, often with
perceptible differences of growth among them. » * * Quainter, graver, odder,
stranger, more irresistibly comic creatures than these young Owls I never saw ;
and the hissing and snoring, and peering looks at the spectator, and strange antic-
contortions I heard and saw, baffle all attempts at description. The entertain-
ment, for such it was most truly, usually began some little time before sunset,
about which time the old birds might be seen commencing their labours of pur-
veying food for Masters and Misses Howlet. At intervals of from seven to ten
minutes one or other of them came to the nest with a prey, and I could always
tell by the sounds and gestures of the young Owls when the old one was approach-
ing. ' How they knew I could not tell ; it was not by sight, and I could hear no.