MORE BIRD CENSUSES
One of the several bird censuses being undertaken has already proved that fears of the disappearance of that great old country character, the barn owl, arc more or less.ground- less. We are happier than Malta where an unprecedented plague of rats has followed the virtual extinction of the barn owl. The bird has been specially" featured "by the Associated Learned Societies of Liverpool. The Naturalists' Field Club has discovered and watched two dozen pairs on the Merseyside, photographed parents and children and food, and produced a barn owl poster. Some young Cambridge men working for the census in Hertfordshire also found more pairs than they expected to find ; and some of the haunts and nesting sites were unlikely. One was a metal barn in a busy railway yard. On the subject of censuses, it is recorded by Mr. Middleton's new Journal of Animal Ecology that there were 4,209 rooks' nesta
last year in the Isle of Wight. W. BEACH THOMAS.
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