For a long time that fish was to me the most puzzling thing in the whole incident; for at that season no fish are to be found, except in deep water off shore.  Some weeks later I learned that, just previous to the incident, several fishermen’s dories, with full fares, had been upset on the east side of the island when trying to land through a heavy surf.  The dead fish had been carried around by the tides, and the owl had been deceived into showing his method of fishing.  Undoubtedly, in his northern home, when the ice breaks up and the salmon are running, he goes fishing from an ice cake as a regular occupation.

The owl lit upon a knoll, not two hundred yards from where I sat motionless, and gave me a good opportunity of watching him at his meal.  He treated the fish exactly as he would have treated a rat or duck:  stood on it with one foot, gripped the long claws of the other through it, and tore it to pieces savagely, as one would a bit of paper.  The beak was not used, except to receive the pieces, which were conveyed up to it by his foot, as a parrot eats.  He devoured everything—­fins, tail, skin, head, and most of the bones, in great hungry mouthfuls.  Then he hopped to the top of the knoll, sat up straight, puffed out his feathers to look big, and went to sleep.  But with the first slight movement I made to creep nearer, he was wide awake and flew to a higher point.  Such hearing is simply marvelous.

The stomach of an owl is peculiar, there being no intermediate crop, as in other birds.  Every part of his prey small enough (and the mouth and throat of an owl are large out of all proportion) is greedily swallowed.  Long after the flesh is digested, feathers, fur, and bones remain in the stomach, softened by acids, till everything is absorbed that can afford nourishment, even to the quill shafts, and the ends and marrow of bones.  The dry remains are then rolled into large pellets by the stomach, and disgorged.

This, by the way, suggests the best method of finding an owl’s haunts.  It is to search, not overhead, but on the ground under large trees, till a pile of these little balls, of dry feathers and hair and bones, reveals the nest or roosting place above.

It seems rather remarkable that my fisherman-owl did not make a try at the coots that were so plenty about him.  Rarely, I think, does he attempt to strike a bird of any kind in the daytime.  His long training at the north, where the days are several months long, has adapted his eyes to seeing perfectly, both in sunshine and in darkness; and with us he spends the greater part of each day hunting along the beaches.  The birds at such times are never molested.  He seems to know that he is not good at dodging; that they are all quicker than he, and are not to be caught napping.  And the birds, even the little birds, have no fear of him in the sunshine; though they shiver themselves to sleep when they think of him at night.