CHAPTER VI: Hooty The Owl Doesn't Stay Still

Now what's the good of being smart
When others do not do their part?

If Blacky the Crow didn't say this to himself, he thought it. He
knew that he had made a very cunning plan to get the eggs of Hooty
the Owl, a plan so shrewd and cunning that no one else in the Green
Forest or on the Green Meadows would have thought of it. There was
only one weakness in it, and that was that it depended for success
on having Hooty the Owl do as he usually did when tormented by a
crowd of noisy Crows, -- stay where he was until they got tired and
flew away.

Now Blacky sometimes makes a mistake that smart people are very apt
to make; he thinks that because he is so smart, other people are
stupid. That is where he proves that smart as he is, he isn't as
smart as he thinks he is. He always thought of Hooty the Owl as
stupid. That is, he always thought of him that way in daytime. At
night, when he was waked out of a sound sleep by the fierce hunting
cry of Hooty, he wasn't so sure about Hooty being stupid, and he
always took care to sit perfectly still in the darkness, lest
Hooty's great ears should hear him and

Hooty's great eyes, made for seeing in the dark, should find
him. No, in the night Blacky was not at all sure that Hooty was
stupid.

But in the daytime he was sure. You see, he quite forgot the fact
that the brightness of day is to Hooty what the blackness of night