Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/122

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

s. xn. AUG. s, 1903.

replies to their mockeries by awkward and ridiculous gestures, by turning his head, and rolling

his eyes with an air of stupidity It sometimes

happens that the little birds pursue their insults

with the same imprudent zeal with which the owl pursued his depredations : they hunt him the whole day : but when night returns he makes his pursuers pay dear for their former sports ; nor is man always an unconcerned spectator. The birdcatchers have got an art of counterfeiting the cry of the owl exactly, and having before lined [limed?] the branches of a hedge, they sit unseen and give the call. At this all the little birds flock to the place, where they expect to find their well-known enemy, but instead of finding their stupid antagonist, they are stuck fast to the hedge themselves : this sport must be put into practice an hour before nightfall, in order to succeed : for if it is put off till later, those birds which but a few minutes sooner came to provoke their enemy will then fly from him with as much terror as they just before showed insolence/' Pp. 348, 349.

To Sam Slick's observation that "there is a great deal of human nature in man " we might add and not a little in birds.

I may mention that one of the books of my childhood was 'Mother's Fables,' which con- tained a memorable picture of an owl being baited in the sunshine. ST. SWITHIN.

Timseus, as quoted by Plutarch in his ' Life of Nicias,' evidently does not mean that the Sicilians gathered about Gylippus for the same reason that birds do about an owl, for the owl is generally detested by other birds, possessing as he does a character that is not at all calculated to enlist a following, or to create a gathering of the feathered tribe in any way favourably disposed towards him. He must have employed the simile only by way of illustrating the manner of their gathering, having regard, that is, to their numbers, and to the close quarters at which they assembled round the Spartan general. The tricks of the owl by night render him the terror of nearly all other birds, great and small. This fact leads to his playing in Northern Italy an extraordinary part in the sports of the peasantry, who, having caught and tamed one, chain him by the leg to a small cross-bar at the top of a high pole. The pole is then fixed in the earth near a wood, in a position commanded by several windows of some villa or farmhouse. Half blinded by the light, he draws down over his eyes the filmy curtain provided by nature for the purpose, prepared to 'endure patiently all the jeers and insults which the fast assem- bling birds from the neighbouring groves and thickets can launch at him as they scream, chirp, and flit about their old enemy in the effort to do him to death. But concealed behind half a dozen darkened windows are the " sportsmen," with their fowling-pieces well

charged with shot ; and when the dance of death is at its height the guns are discharged into the midst of the hosts of birds, when the grass is strewn for many yards round with the bodies of the slain. Thus what is a "sport" of questionable "legitimacy" in modern times in Northern Italy seems to have come under the notice of the historian of Sicily as one indulged in similarly by the Sicilians. The antiquity, if not necessarily the universality, of the custom is suggested by MR. KUMAGUSU MINAKATA'S interesting references to its occurrence in Japanese literature and folk-lore.

J. HOLDEN MAcMlCHAEL.

The comparatively diurnal habit of the little owl (Athene noctua) renders it par- ticularly liable to be mobbed by small birds in daylight. Continental birdcatchers often use it as a lure on that account.

J. DORMER.

According bo the ' Mabinogi ' of " Math the son of Mathonwy," the owl is really Blodeu- wedd, the maiden created out of flowers by Gwydion ap Don and Math ap Mathonwy to be a wife for Llew Llaw Gyffes. Having proved unfaithful to her husband, she was by Gwydion transformed into an owl :

"And he said unto her, 'I will not slay thee, but I will do unto thee worse than that. For I will turn thee into a bird ; and because of the shame thou hast done unto Llew Llaw Gyffes thou shalt never show thy face in the light of day henceforth ; and that through fear of all the other birds. For it shall be their nature to attack thee, and to chase thee from wheresoever they may find thee. And thou shalt not lose thy name, but shalt be always called Blodeuwedd.' Now Blodeuwedi is an owl in the language of this present time, and for this reason is the owl hateful unto all birds. And even now the- owl is called Blodeuwedd."

Is the owl still called Blodeuwedd in Welsh? Lady Charlotte Guest mentions in a note to the ' Mabinogi ' that Dafydd ap Gwilym has a poem on the subject of this transformation of Blodeuwedd. Is this poem accessible in an English version 1 H. 1. B.

Highgate.

"VlTA POSSE PRIORE FRUI " (9 th S. XI. 389,

436). The correspondent who asked for the whereabouts of this quotation (which comes from Martial, x. 23) might care to refer to Andrew Amos's 'Martial and the Moderns' (1858, Cambridge and London), p. 87, from which he will learn or be reminded that the last sentence of Martial's epigram,

Hoc est Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui,

is the motto of the ninety-fourth Spectator,