If you're worried about ticks, put up an owl box.

The animal driving most Lyme disease in the eastern US is the white-footed mouse. Ticks that feed on them are far more likely to come away infected than ticks that feed on other animals. The bigger the local mouse population, the worse the next year's tick year.

A single barred owl pair raising chicks can take hundreds of rodents in a breeding season. Owls also don't carry Lyme. The bacterium can't survive their digestive tract, so an owl that eats an infected mouse is a dead end for the disease.

Researchers at the Cary Institute, the leading lab on Lyme ecology, have been explicit about this: "Landscapes that support predators have reduced Lyme disease risk."

One owl box on its own isn't going to fix a tick year. But a yard with owls, foxes, bobcats, and weasels in it has fewer mice, and a yard with fewer mice has fewer infected ticks.

If you have woods or fields nearby, a properly sized barn owl or screech owl box (different species, different ...

In 1927 a British army doctor in India fed rats the diet of the English working class, and the rats ate each other.

Robert McCarrison ran the nutrition laboratory at Coonoor in the Nilgiri hills. He had spent 20 years among the peoples of northern India and had noticed that the Sikhs and the Pathans, who ate milk, butter, meat and wholemeal chapatis, were among the finest physical specimens in the Empire, and that the rice-eating peoples of the south were not.

So he fed rats the diets of the nations and watched.

The rats on the Sikh diet grew large, glossy and placid, bred well, and were free of disease. He kept over 1,000 of them for years without a single illness.

Then he fed a batch the diet of the poorer classes of England: white bread, margarine, sweetened tea, boiled cabbage and potato, tinned meat, and jam.

They stopped growing properly. Their coats went. They developed the ailments of an English industrial town, stomach and bowel disease, bad lungs, bad teeth. And their temper changed. ...

A medieval peasant's yard held a cow, a pig, a few hens and a handful of sheep, and almost none of it was ever going to reach his own table.

The hens belonged to the rent. A set number of eggs was owed to the lord every Easter, and a set number of birds every Christmas.

The cow was for milk. The family lived on her skimmed milk, her curds and the cheap green cheese, and sold the butter. Her calf was walked to market every year, because the rent was due in silver and a calf was the only thing in the yard worth any.

The pig could feed in the wood only if the lord was paid a fee per head for the acorns. In November it was killed, and the sides of bacon followed the calf to market. The family kept the head, the trotters and the blood.

The sheep had to spend every night penned on the lord's land, so that their dung fed his fields and not the peasant's.

Off the top of all of it came the tithe. Every 10th lamb, piglet, calf and fleece went to the church, with a tenth of the eggs and milk.

The lord's pigeons ...