THE BIRDS OF AUSTRALIA. 
Remark. Very powerful, nearly allied to Athene strenua.'^ 
A good plate was given in the Birds of Australia^ but the last remark 
appears to have misled workers. 
When Sharpe drew up his Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum, 
Vol. II., 1875, he placed the name as a synonym of strenua, which proves 
conclusively that he neither read Gould’s description nor referred to his plate. 
It has been assumed that Sharpe concluded that rufa must be the young of 
strenua, but this assumption is impossible, as Sharpe carefully described and 
catalogued the immature of strenua, which gave no colouring at all resembling 
the description of rufa. Moreover, Sharpe had skins at that time practically 
agreeing with that description, so that his action is incomprehensible and 
can only have been due to a very bad oversight. It, however, caused 
confusion, and Sharpe himself never rectified his mistake, which was 
continued in the “ Handlist ” Birds. 
De Vis appears to have been the first to detect Sharpe’s error, as when 
recording birds from New Guinea in the Ann. Rep. Brit. New Guinea, App. EE, 
p. 99, 1894, he observed under the name Ninox humeralis Hombr. and Jacq. : 
‘‘This owl is identical with one of the large owls of the mountain scrubs 
of the Cardwell district of Queensland, N. rufa Gld., at one time supposed 
to be the young of N. strenua Gld. The present example is unusually 
small (wing 320 mm.) and is rather paler on the abdomen than Queensland 
birds. One may regard the latter as an isolated race, whether in its original 
seat or not.” 
This note attracted the attention of North, who in the Austr. Mus. Cat., 
No. 4, p. 28, 1898, catalogued Ninox humeralis with the remarks : “It was 
in an Appendix to the ‘ Annual Report on British New Guinea for 1894 ’ 
that Mr. De Vis, the Curator of the Queensland Museum, first drew attention 
to the existence of this species in Australia, and he there states his belief 
that it is identical with Ninox rufa of Gould. Mr. De Vis has kindly sent me 
for examination a specimen obtained in the scrubs of north-eastern Queens- 
land. It is a male and is labelled ‘Herbert Gorge, October 1886.’ This 
specimen cannot be distinguished from typical examples of N. humeralis 
obtained in New Guinea. In all the specimens examined belonging to this 
species, the ear-coverts are black and the tail-feathers crossed with eight 
pale brown bars.” 
On p. 26 he had catalogued Ninox rufa, with a long note of explanation 
on p. 27 : “ Mr. G. R. Gray in his ‘ Hand-List of Birds ’ places Gould’s name 
of N. rufa as a synonym of N. strenua, in which he is followed by Dr. Sharpe 
in the Catalogue of the Birds in the British Museum. N. rufa is, howev^er, a 
good and distinct species. Closely allied, if not identical with it, is 
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