SCOPS EARED OWL. 



115 



summer, but is found at that season in the southern part of 

 Germany. In France it is not uncommon, and is said to 

 appear and depart with the Swallow. Advancing southward 

 to the shores of the Mediterranean, it is even plentiful ; and 

 Mr. W. Spence, the well known Entomologist, has thus 

 recorded its summer habits : — * 



" This Owl, which in summer is very common in Italy, is 

 remarkable for the constancy and regularity with which it 

 utters its peculiar note or cry. It does not merely ' to the 

 moon complain"* occasionally, but keeps repeating its plaintive 

 and monotonous cry of ' kew, kew,"^ (whence its Florentine 

 name of Chiu, pronounced almost exactly like the English 

 letter q,) in the regular intervals of about two seconds, the 

 livelong night ; and until one is used to it, nothing can well 

 be more wearisome. Towards the end of April last year, 

 1830, one of these Owls established itself in the large Jardin 

 Annlais. behind the house where we resided at Florence ; 

 and, until our departure for Switzerland in the beginning of 

 June, I recollect but one or two instances in which it was not 

 constantly to be heard, as if in spite to the Nightingales 

 which abounded there, from nightfall to midnight (and pro- 

 bably much later), whenever I chanced to be in the back part 

 of the house, or took our friends to listen to it, and always 

 with precisely the same unwearied cry, and the intervals be- 

 tween each as regular as the ticking of a pendulum. This 

 species of Owl, according to Professor Savi*'s excellent 

 Ornitologia Toscana, vol. i. p. 74, is the only Italian species 

 which migrates ; passing the winter in Africa and southern 

 Asia, and the summer in the south of Europe. It feeds 

 wholly upon beetles, grasshoppers, and other insects." 



This little Owl, according to Dr. Smith, goes as far south 

 in Africa as Senegal ; but the species described by Mr. 

 Swainson under the name of Scops Senegalensis, in his Birds 



* Mr. Loudon's Magazine of Natural History, vol. v. p. 654. 



I 2 



