Moping A man can suffer graver as well as less
abstruse 'nip fortunes than to lose a pet owl by drowning; but when this happens—as it now has to me—two years running, he may well be excused if he becomes uneasy in his mind and wonders whether he is not under a rather specialised form of curse. Both birds were found, soon after they had learnt to fly, face, downwards in the swimming-pool. I know that owls in their natural wild state do sometimes drown themselves in water' butts, cattle-troughs and other receptacles whose rims, being more or less flush with the water, make accidents comparatively easy. But the edge of my swimming-pool is several inches above the surface of its insalubrious-looking contents, and only a suicidal impulse could have explained an owl getting into the water from the edge of the pool. Diligent enquiry into possible causes of these twin tragedies has produced, from a man of wide experience in these matters, a theory which makes sense to me. He says that owls often fly loW over a sheet of water (and certainly the one of mine which survived the longer often glided low across the pool at twilight) and that when doing so they like to actually touch the water with their breast feathers. This is normally a perfectly safe manoeuvre; but if an owl has been taken away from its mother and brought up by human beings, it very often does not learn to preen itself properly. The result is that its feathers tend to be slightly matted and, instead of brushing lightly along the surface, become quickly water- logged, with fatal results. The remedy, according to this authority, is to spray your owl with water regularly before it learns to fly. So it seems that I am not, after all, under curse; I have just been neglecting the petits soins.
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