nt later it had disappeared, and the seaweed was flying again.

There was a prize in the old blind evidently. But what was he doing
there? Till then I had supposed that the owl always takes his game
from the wing. Farther along the beach was a sand bluff overlooking
the proceedings. I gained it after a careful stalk, crept to the edge,
and looked over. Down in the blind a big snowy owl was digging away
like a Trojan, tearing out sand and seaweed with his great claws,
first one foot, then the other, like a hungry hen, and sending it up
in showers behind him over the old mast. Every few moments he would
stop suddenly, bristle up all his feathers till he looked comically
big and fierce, take a look out over the log and along the beach, then
fall to digging again furiously.

I suppose that the object of this bristling up before each observation
was to strike terror into the heart of any enemy that might be
approaching to surprise him at his unusual work. It is an owl trick.
Wounded birds always use it when approached.

And the object of the digging? That was perfectly evident. A beach rat
had jumped down into the blind, after some fragments of lunch,
undoubtedly, and being unable to climb out, had started to tunnel up
to the surface. The owl heard him at work, and started a stern chase.
He won, too, for right in the midst of a fury of seaweed he shot up
with the rat in his claws--so suddenly that he almost escaped me. Had
it not been for the storm and his underground digging, he surely
would have heard me long before I could get near enough to see what he
was doing; for his eyes and ears are wonderfully keen.

In his southern visits, or perhaps on the ice fields of the Arctic
ocean, he has discovered a more novel way of procuring his food than
digging for it. He has turned fisherman and learned to fish. Once only
have I seen him get his dinner in this way. It was on the north shore
of Nantucket, one day in the winter of 1890-91, when the remarkable
flight of white owls came down from the north. The chord of the bay
was full of floating ice, and swimming about the shoals were thousands
of coots. While watching the latter through my field-glass, I noticed
a snowy owl standing up still and straight on the edge of a big ice
cake. "Now what is that fellow doing there?" I thought.--"I know! He
is trying to drift down close to that flock of coots before they see
him."

That was interesting; so I sat down on a rock to watch. W