When I found that this first settlement on the gateway had succeeded so well, I set about forming other establishments.  This year I have had four broods, and I trust that next season I can calculate on having nine.  This will be a pretty increase, and it will help to supply the place of those which in this neighbourhood are still unfortunately doomed to death, by the hand of cruelty or superstition.  We can now always have a peep at the owls, in their habitation on the old ruined gateway, whenever we choose.  Confident of protection, these pretty birds betray no fear when the stranger mounts up to their place of abode.  I would here venture a surmise, that the barn owl sleeps standing.  Whenever we go to look at it, we invariably see it upon the perch bolt upright, and often with its eyes closed, apparently fast asleep.  Buffon and Bewick err (no doubt, unintentionally) when they say that the barn owl snores during its repose.  What they took for snoring was the cry of the young birds for food.  I had fully satisfied myself on this score some years ago.  However, in December, 1823, I was much astonished to hear this same snoring kind of noise, which had been so common in the month of July.  On ascending the ruin, I found a brood of young owls in the apartment.

Upon this ruin is placed a perch, about a foot from the hole at which the owls enter.  Sometimes, at midday, when the weather is gloomy, you may see an owl upon it, apparently enjoying the refreshing diurnal breeze.  This year (1831) a pair of barn owls hatched their young, on the 7th of September, in a sycamore tree near the old ruined gateway.

If this useful bird caught its food by day, instead of hunting for it by night, mankind would have ocular demonstration of its utility in thinning the country of mice, and it would be protected and encouraged every where.  It would be with us what the ibis was with the Egyptians.  When it has young, it will bring a mouse to the nest about every twelve or fifteen minutes.  But, in order to have a proper idea of the enormous quantity of mice which this bird destroys we must examine the pellets which it ejects from its stomach in the place of its retreat.  Every pellet contains from four to seven skeletons of mice.  In sixteen months from the time that the apartment of the owl on the old gateway was cleaned out, there has been a deposit of above a bushel of pellets.

The barn owl sometimes carries off rats.  One evening I was sitting under a shed, and killed a very large rat, as it was coming out of a hole, about ten yards from where I was watching it.  I did not go to take it up, hoping to get another shot.  As it lay there, a barn owl pounced upon it, and flew away with it.