Owls.—­Of the nocturnal accipitres the most remarkable is the brown owl, which, from its hideous yell, has acquired the name of the “Devil-Bird."[1] The Singhalese regard it literally with horror, and its scream by night in the vicinity of a village is bewailed as the harbinger of impending calamity.[2] There is a popular legend in connection with it, to the effect that a morose and savage husband, who suspected the fidelity of his wife, availed himself of her absence to kill her child, of whose paternity he was doubtful, and on her return placed before her a curry prepared from its flesh.  Of this the unhappy woman partook, till discovering the crime by finding the finger of her infant, she fled in frenzy to the forest, and there destroyed herself.  On her death she was metamorphosed, according to the Buddhist belief, into an ulama, or Devil-bird, which still at nightfall horrifies the villagers by repeating the frantic screams of the bereaved mother in her agony.

[Footnote 1:  Syrnium Indranee, Sykes. Mr. Blyth writes to me from Calcutta that there are some doubts about this bird.  There would appear to be three or four distinguishable races, the Ceylon bird approximating most nearly to that of the Malayan Peninsula.]

[Illustration:  THE “DEVIL BIRD.”]

[Footnote 2:  The horror of this nocturnal scream was equally prevalent in the West as in the East.  Ovid introduces it in his Fasti, L. vi. l. 139; and Tibullus in his Elegies, L. i.  El. 5.  Statius says—­

  Nocturnaeque gemunt striges, et feralla bubo
  Damna canens.  Theb. iii. l. 511.

But Pliny, l. xi. c. 93, doubts as to what bird produced the sound;—­and the details of Ovid’s description do not apply to an owl.

Mr. Mitford, of the Ceylon Civil Service, to whom I am indebted for many valuable notes relative to the birds of the island, regards the identification of the Singhalese Devil-Bird as open to similar doubt:  he says—­“The Devil-Bird is not an owl.  I never heard it until I came to Kornegalle, where it haunts the rocky hill at the back of Government-house.  Its ordinary note is a magnificent clear shout like that of a human being, and which can be heard at a great distance, and has a fine effect in the silence of the closing night.  It has another cry like that of a hen just caught, but the sounds which have earned for it its bad name, and which I have heard but once to perfection, are indescribable, the most appalling that can be imagined, and scarcely to be heard without shuddering; I can only compare it to a boy in torture, whose screams are being stopped by being strangled.  I have offered rewards for a specimen, but without success.  The only European who had seen and fired at one agreed with the natives that it is of the size of a pigeon, with a long tail.  I believe it is a Podargus or Night Hawk.”  In a subsequent note he further says—­“I have since seen two birds by moonlight, one of the size and shape of a cuckoo, the other a large black bird, which I imagine to be the one which gives these calls.”]