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THE SONIC YARD PROTECTOR The advert in the small ads section of the Sunday Mirror read - '24 Hour Protection Against Unwanted Animal Intruders. Simply place the Sonic Yard Protector in your garden and repel foxes, dogs, cats, rabbits, squirrels, rodents, insects and more! The new Sonic Yard Protector broadcasts a powerful, continuous ultrasonic pulse that will irritate animal pests and drive them away. It also has a built-in PIR motion detector which will sense any animal intruder's movement and activate the system to emit an owl sound'.      I read it twice. There was something wrong with the advert but I couldn't put my finger on it. Not to worry, I thought, it sounds like just the sort of thing I need to keep the neighbourhood's cats out of my back garden, which they have taken to using as a meeting place of late, and promptly sent off for one. I should have worried. Although, true to its promise, the Sonic Yard Protector kept away everything it claimed it would keep away. In fact since I erected it we have had in our garden not a single, cat, dog, rabbit, squirrel or fox, leastwise not during hours of daylight. What we have had, and still have, is an owl. And a particularly loud owl at that. And when we got the owl I realised what it was that was wrong with the advert. If, as it claimed, the Sonic Yard Protector kept out all uninvited cats, dogs etc, why then would you need a built-in PIR motion detector which would sense any intruding animal movements and activate the system to emit an owl sound? Because if the Sonic Yard Protector was doing its job you wouldn't have any intruding animals to protect against, would you!      Well we were certainly getting animal intruders because at two-oclock in the morning the day after I put it up The Trouble and I were awoken by the loud hooting of an owl. Well at least we knew that the owl sound worked, we consoled ourselves. We knew it again when it woke us up again an hour later. The following night it woke us up at 12.30 am, then again at half past three. The second time it woke us up there wasn't one owl hooting but two. I looked out of the bedroom window. There, as large as life, was an owl perched on the garden shed, next to the Sonic Yard Protector. The bloody thing had attracted it! The following day I took the Sonic Yard Protector down before the owl found a way of mating with it and we ended up with a gardenful of owls. But the owl keeps coming back. Looking for its 'mate' I suppose. So now we are awoken in the middle of the night by a real owl. And during the day we have a gardenful of cats again.      I believe that owls are a protected species. All I can say is that I hope the protection comes in the form of a bulletproof vest because if it keeps coming for much longer I'm going to shoot it.