Page:The birds of Tierra del Fuego - Richard Crawshay.djvu/94

28 Mr. Jerdon states that it arrives in India at the beginning of the cold weather, and leaves again about March, spreading itself in the interval over the entire Peninsula, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, and being often flushed and killed by the Florican hunters. Every country of the European Continent enumerates it in the list of its avifauna. It is common on the Amur, and doubtless in every part of China. In America, it frequents the fur countries in the summer, and at other seasons the whole of the Northern States, from east to west. We have ourselves been enabled to compare specimens from the Straits of Magellan. Brazil, and North America, with others from every part of Africa and India, all of which were so strictly similar in their markings and size that it was impossible to distinguish them. In Australia. New Zealand, and Polynesia it has never been found; neither have I any reason to suppose that it is a native of any of the Indian Islands, such as Borneo, Java, the Philippines, and Japan; everywhere else this flapping diurnal Owl appears to be either a constant resident or a migrant."

"In England, this bird is known to sportsmen as the Woodcock Owl, from the circumstance of its numbers being greatly augmented about the time of the arrival of that bird in November; in all probability, both species are under the same influence, and compulsorily leave the coast of Norway with the first favourable wind. In November, then, great accessions to the numbers of this bird are observed to take place on our eastern shores, whence they spread themselves over the entire country, and are frequently to be met with, in the latter part of the Partridge-season, among the great turnip-fields and low sedgy flats of Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and Huntingdon shires. Certain districts are occasionally overrun with the common field mouse to such an extent that the young plantations would be entirely destroyed, were their numbers not kept down by the Short-eared Owl. Instances are on record of from ten to twenty being seen together; and hence it has been regarded by some as a gregarious bird, which indeed it is, so long as there is an abundance of this kind, but no longer: the mice failing, it feeds upon any other