In the Neighbourhood of Salisbury. 123 
given by them almost every evening. ,They certainly laid claim to 
the prerogative assigned to them in those verses of Barry Cornwall :— 
‘‘We know not alway, who are Kings of the day, 
But the King of the Night is the bold Brown Owl.’’ 
Yes! and a bold fellow he truly is—and I wish I could justly 
urge as much in the cause of his preservation as in that of his first 
cousin, the Barn Owl; but I am afraid truth will not let me do so 
—for at times they are most destructive to other birds. As an 
instance of which I can quote, from personal knowledge, that a friend 
of mine in Cornwall lost one season no less than seventy-two newly- 
hatched Wild Ducks, the mystery of whose disappearance he could 
not for some time solve, until at last he discovered some of the 
remains of the unfortunate ducklings beneath a fine old elm tree on 
the edge of the pond, where a pair of Brown Owls had their nest; 
and on further examination of the castings thrown up by those 
birds, no doubt remained of the matter. But such was the veneration 
of the master of the house for all species of the Ow] tribe, that, if 
- my memory serves me aright, they escaped their well-merited doom, 
and the future broods of ducklings were more carefully tended. I 
took a pair of these birds last year from the nest, in this parish, 
which were, I suppose, about one third grown. But what struck 
me at the time particularly was the excessive cleanliness of the place, 
for you could scarcely call it a nest, from which I took them. There 
were neither feathers, castings, nor faces of any kind in the place 
where they were located. They were nestling on some rotten wood 
inside a deep recess of a limb of a tree which had been blown off, 
and I could only account for the fact, at the time, by supposing that 
the parent birds had but just removed them from the original nest 
into this, their drawing-room; but I do not know whether it is 
customary for these birds ever so to change their place of abode, 
should it become in any way dangerous to safety, or possibly un- 
pleasant from long inhabitation. 
Surnia Ulula, “The Hawk ” or “ Canadian Owl.” I come now 
to mention this bird, of which Wiltshire, I believe, contains the 
only European specimen as yet recorded. This species is an 
