122 STRIGID A. 
part of Germany. In France it is not uncommon, and is 
said to appear and depart with the Swallow. Advancing 
southward to the shores and islands 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 Chi, pronounced almost exactly like 
the English letter e,) 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 Anglais, 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 probably 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 
Ornithologia Toscana, v. 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 Hurope. It feeds 
wholly upon beetles, grasshoppers, and other insects.” 
This little Owl, according to Dr. Smith, goes as far 
south m Africa as Senegal; but the species described by 
Mr. Swainson under the name of Scops Senegalensis, in his 
* Mr. Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, vol. v. p. 654. 
