The birds that really started me in the serious, and yet amusing task of keeping an aviary, were two little Californian screech owls.
The year was 1899, and I was studying boy life in the charming Belmont School, twenty-five miles from San Francisco. The grounds of the school lie on the lower slope of hills that enclose an open valley fronting the bay of San Francisco. A walk of twelve miles took us to the shores of the Pacific. Close to the school were beautiful cañons that the boys and older persons were never tired of exploring. The lads of the school were allowed to keep dogs, horses, pigeons, poultry—indeed, any pets they chose to have. One day, when I was up in the poultry yard, where there were some choice bantams and game-fowl, I saw a boy trotting about with a box in his hand.
“What have you there?” I asked.
“Four little owls,” he replied. “I got them the other day when I was out walking, and I had their mother too, but she has flown away.”
“What are you going to do with them?” I said.
“I don’t know,” he replied thoughtfully. “I don’t want to bother with them. I suppose it would be best to kill them.”
I looked in the box. Those four solemn-eyed, motherless balls of down appealed to me. In southern California I had been very much taken with the little owls that sat on hillocks, and turned their heads round and round to look after any one riding or driving by, until it really seemed as if they would twist them off.
I felt that I must adopt these little Northerners, so I said to the boy, “I will take them.”
He joyfully resigned his charges, for he did not like the idea of destroying them, and I thoughtfully pursued my way to my room; what did owls eat?
I asked everybody I met, and the universal recommendation was, “Give them raw meat. That is the best substitute for the birds, mice, and insects that their parents catch for them.”
I went to the Japanese cook, and with a friendly grin he seized a huge knife and swung himself down the hill to the meat-room.
On receiving a piece of beef, I minced it fine, and dropped small morsels into the open beaks of my new pets. They were hungry, and after eating, nestled down together and went to sleep.
The days are mild, but the nights are chilly about the bay of San Francisco. So after their latest supper, I put a rubber bag of hot water under their nest and covered them up for the night.
In the morning I hurried to their basket, and uncovered the nest I had made for them. They were as warm as toast, and four wide-open beaks pleaded eloquently for food. I cut up more meat, and for days fed them when hungry, and carried them out of doors in the sunshine, where they were objects of interest to every one about the place, especially to the dogs that would fain have devoured them.
One Sierra collie dog, Teddy Roosevelt by name, in whose upbringing I was assisting, used to tremble as he stared at them, partly from jealousy, partly because he recognized lawful prey in them.
One day some one suggested gopher—that is, ground-squirrel meat—as a change of diet. The gophers do an immense amount of damage in California on lawns and in flower-gardens, where they burrow to get at the tender roots.
I went to a house near by, where a gentleman was trying to get rid of the gophers that were devastating his lawn. He put up a warning hand when he saw me coming. A line of hose lay beside him, with which he had been trying to flood a gopher out of his hole. Presently the poor little fellow came struggling up. The gentleman despatched him with a satisfied, “He is the last one. Now the grass will grow.”
He presented me with the dead body, and animated by a feeling of duty to my owl family, I carried it home, cut off a piece, and offered it to the owls. They would not eat it. They preferred mutton, beef, or veal. On these they flourished.
Soon I had another meat-eating bird given to me. While walking in a beautiful cañon, where live-oaks and ferns, green from spring rains, abounded, one of the teachers who had strayed from the rest of the party, came back to us with a young sparrowhawk that he had found. No parents seemed to be near. If left on the ground it would perish. In the light of subsequent experience, I would have put it high up on a branch and left it, trusting to the parents to find it. At that time I did not understand how faithful and constant birds are in following their young, so I took it in spite of its dismal squawks, and carried it back to the school.
My owls, by this time, had grown famously, and like children, they began to exercise their tiny limbs. It was very amusing to see them trying to climb from the center of their box to the top. They would stretch out diminutive claws, mount over each other, fall back, try again, and finally succeeded in sitting all in a row on the top, looking with solemn, questioning eyes on the great world around them. I put Hawkie with them, and they adopted him as a brother, and usually kept him in the middle. It was a pretty sight to see the row of five, with the mottled, brown bird tucked snugly between his owl friends.
When the summer vacation came, and the boys dispersed, I went with some friends to live in a cottage across the bay of San Francisco, just under the slope of Mount Tamalpais. At the back of the cottage was a veranda shaded by a climbing rose. In the rose branches I put Hawkie and my two owls, named Solomon and Betsy.
Very regretfully I had been obliged to part from two of the little owls, for the boy who had given them to me was so pleased with the progress they had made, that he asked for the return of a part of his gift. I was sorry afterward that he had not let me keep them, for a cat soon made away with them. As the summer went by, I wondered that I did not lose my three pets. They sat all day long in the rose branches. Daytime, of course, is sleepy time for owls, but even when dusk came on they made no attempt to fly away, and the hawk only made one or two half-hearted efforts to fly across the garden out into the road.
Toward autumn the owls were fully developed, and other little screech owls had found them out, and at dusk would come about the cottage, saying softly, “Too, who, who, who, who!”
Solomon and Betsy never seemed interested enough to respond, and every evening I took them in the house where Hawkie went to sleep, and Betsy and Solomon became lively, and in the gentlest and sweetest of tones hooted for their meat.
They were tiny creatures, their bodies being not much larger than a New England robin’s, but their eyes seemed immense. They had a peculiar habit of staring at their food, then twisting their heads round and round before they pounced on it. It was very amusing to see the owls “focus,” and it became a way of entertaining our friends.
They often had a tug of war over their meat, when I gave it to them without cutting it up. Sollie would seize one end of a piece of beefsteak, and Betsy would grasp the other, and then they would brace their little claws and pull until the taste of the raw flesh being too tantalizing, one would let go to swallow a morsel, and at once lose the whole thing.
When the autumn had come we, with other summer residents, left Mill Valley where, I must not forget to say, numbers of beautiful birds abounded. Some of the public-spirited citizens had imported foreign birds in the hope of acclimating them. I was often awakened by a gay note and a flash of red at the window, as some foreigner wished me good-morning. The birds were protected, and the fine forests were also protected. When we went for picnics, mounted guards would warn us that we must light no fires under the magnificent old trees.
The owl’s next place of residence was Berkeley, where my younger sister went to take classes in the State University. We had rented a small cottage there, and to this day we laugh over our experiences in moving to our new home. We had the two owls, Hawkie, the dog Teddy, and a chipmunk that my married sister had brought me from Lake Tahoe, that most beautiful of Californian summer resorts. How were we to take charge of all these creatures? For we had to cross the bay of San Francisco, then recross it to Berkeley. We finally got a large cage for Hawkie and the owls, and put in a compartment, giving them the upper part, and the chipmunk the lower. The dog we put on a chain.
Taking the train from Mill Valley to Sausalito, we boarded the steamer for San Francisco, changed to another, and went across the bay to Oakland, thence by train to Berkeley. When we arrived there it was late in the afternoon, and my sister and I, the dog, the owls, Hawkie, and the chipmunk, were all tired out. Indeed, the dog, who was very petted and spoiled, and who did not enjoy traveling, had dark rings around his eyes, and was in a peevish, mischievous condition. To my sister’s disgust, for she being the younger was the victim, he started to run away. She had to run after him, and came back exhausted.
To add to our troubles, we could not get into our cottage that night. Fortunately, our landlady took boarders, and offered us a room in her house. We gladly accepted this offer, and putting the subdued Teddy in a tool-shed, took the birds in the house.
My sister says she never was more tired in her life than she was that night. We were sleeping blissfully, when we were awakened by a well-known sound. The naughty little owls, glad of the peace and quietness of the night after the turmoil of the day, were hooting persistently and melodiously.
“The landlady and the boarders,” gasped my sister; “they will hear and wake up. Can’t you stop the little wretches?”
I sprang out of bed, and addressed a solemn remonstrance to Solomon and Betsy. They were exceedingly glad to see me, and distending their little throats, continued to hoot, their clear, sweet young voices carrying only too well on the still Californian night air.
Then the chipmunk woke up and began to slide up and down an inclined piece of wood in his part of the cage. We were in despair. We could not sleep, until I had the happy thought of giving the owls a bath. I seized Betsy, held her in a basin of water, and wet her feathers considerably. Then I served Solomon in the same way, and for the rest of the night the tiny little things occupied themselves in smoothing their wet plumage. The chipmunk quieted down, and we had peace.
When we got into the cottage I had a carpenter build a small aviary at the back of it, with a box for rainy weather. The nights were not too cold for my hardy birds. Indeed, they were not too cold for many semi-tropical ones. I found a bird fancier not far from me, who had built a good-sized, open-air aviary, where he kept canaries and foreign finches all the year round, with only a partly open, glass shelter for the birds to use when it rained.
My sparrowhawk did not seem unhappy in my aviary, but he never had the contented, comfortable expression that the owls had. His apathy was pathetic, and the expression of his beautiful, cruel eyes was an unsatisfied one. In time, I should have allowed him to go, but suddenly he fell ill. I think I overfed him, for I got him into the habit of taking a late supper, always leaning out the window and handing him a piece of meat on the end of a stick before I went to bed.
I brought him into the warm kitchen, where he moped about for a few days. Just before he died he came hopping toward the parlor, where I sat entertaining a friend. I often took him in there on the broad windowsill and talked to him as I sat sewing.
He stood in the doorway, gave me a peculiar look, as if to say, “I would come in if you were alone,” hopped back to the kitchen, and in a short time was no more.
My sister and I mourned sincerely for our pretty bird, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that I might have done better if I had left him in his own habitat—but then he might have starved to death if his parents had not found him. Would death by starvation have been any more painful than his death with me? Possibly some larger creature might have killed him swiftly and mercifully—it was a puzzling case, and I resolved to give up worrying about it. I had done what I considered was best, and I tried to console myself for his death in petting the dear little owls that had become so tame that they called to my sister and me whenever they saw us, and loved to have us take them in our hands and caress them.
About them I had no misgivings. They would certainly have died if I had not adopted them, and there was no question about their happiness. They were satisfied with a state of captivity. They had so far lost one of their owl habits, for they kept awake nearly all day, and slept nearly all night—and they could see quite well in the most brilliant Californian sunlight, and that is pretty brilliant. A cat or a dog many yards distant would cause them to raise excitedly the queer little ear tufts that play so prominent a part in the facial expression of some owls, and they would crack their beaks together and hiss angrily if the enemy came too near.
Cats and dogs frightened them, and a broom merely excited them. When strangers wanted to see the elevation of these tufts, a broom, swiftly passed over the floor, would cause Solomon and Betsy to become very wide awake, with feather tufts straight up in the air. I never saw them abjectly and horribly frightened but once. A lady had brought her handsome parrot into the room where the owls were. The poor little mites put up their ear tufts, swayed to and fro on their perch, and instead of packing their feathers and becoming thin and elongated in appearance, as they did for cats and dogs, they puffed themselves out, snapped their beaks, and uttered the loudest hissing noise I had ever heard from them.
From their extremity of fear I concluded that their instinct told them this danger was so imminent that they must make themselves as formidable as possible.
The parrot was of course quickly removed, and I took care that they should never again see another one.