REVIEW, 327 



After these come the dwarf owls or " owlets." The latter word 

 properly means the young of the larger owls (in dialect, sometimes, the 

 adult birds), and had better be kept for them. The first genus can now 

 well afford to give up a mere conversational name, as Mr. Blanford 

 has restored to them " Boie's peculiarly appropriate generic name 

 Athene, " of which they had been stripped in favour of certain butter- 

 flies. The butterflies' claim was based on " competent false witness,." 

 in the shape of a date " 1816 " on the title-page of a book " not 

 really published until 1823 or 1824." 



The alternative generic name for the owls was Carine — a pretty word 

 enough, but liable to mispronunciation and having a rather remote 

 meaning, " a lady who sings dirges." In our province these owls 

 do not sing dirges, but chatter prophecies of good luck as well as bad, 

 as shown in a pretty story in " Old Deccan Days," They are called 

 Pingale. Oddly enough, so is the pied king-fisher, Ceryle varia, by 

 the Kolaba Kolis. Athene hrama is the common species ; A. hlewitti 

 a rare forest species i least rare, apparently, " at the foot of the 

 Satpuras in North- Western Khandesh, where three specimens out of 

 five recorded were obtained by Mr. Davidson. A third, Athene hac- 

 triana, is a Central Asian form, " a local race of ^4. glaux^ which 

 again is merely the eastern desert form of the South, European 

 A. noctua.''^* It is found in our limits in Baluchistan. Another dwarf 

 genus is Glancidium, of which we have one species, G. radiatum, a 

 forest bird. The dwarf owls have no horns, very little " facial disk " 

 and ruff. They are, if not fond of broad daylight, at least quite ready 

 to come out well before sunset, but do most of their hunting after it. 



The last of the Order are the hawk-owls {Ninox). We have one 

 N. scutellata, a forest bird. The ruff and " facial disk " are " quite 

 obsolete " {i.e., it has none), whence, in part, its hawk-like appearance 

 and name. But it is still " chiefly nocturnal." It is rather smaller 

 than (to name a well-known bird) the Turumti {^salon chicquera) 

 and accordingly lives much on insects, which it hawks on the wing 

 but also on mice and lizards. Here ends the order of owls. 



(To he continued.^ 



* A. noctua is supposed to have been the owl of Pallas Athene and therefore, like our 

 Pingale, a bird of counsel rather than, of ill-omen. The Egyptians paid no respect to 

 it, though the " white and horned owl " appear on the monuments, and one of them is an 

 hieroglyphic bird, standing for M, 



