screech-owls

'Perhaps it's always been a haunt of the screech-owls.'

An Open Letter to Fans of South Plains Football 2010

The spotted owl can be found in both old-growth and second-growth redwood forest, along with great horned owls, western screech-owls, and northern pygmy-owls.

California Coastal Steppe, Mixed Forest, and Redwood Forest Province (Bailey) 2009

This was received with inextinguishable laughter, which echoed through the woods like a concert of screech-owls, ending in a _charivari_ of horns and hallooing.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 31, May, 1860 Various

It is during those nights, nights misty and grey, that the hemp-dresser tells his weird stories of will-o’-the-wisps and milk-white hares, of souls in torment and wizards changed to wolves, of witches’ vigils at the cross-roads, and screech-owls, prophetesses of the graveyard.

Appendix. I. A Country Wedding 1917

Moss, grass, and wild parsley flourished in the cracks of the walls, screech-owls already discovered convenient places for their nests, and amorous sparrows hopped lovingly about where holy priests should have been teaching lessons of chastity.

Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine Lewis Spence 1914

The only sound that I did hear -- and it is indelibly registered in the memory cells occupied by this experience -- was the weird note of one of the small screech-owls which are common in this section, the cry of which no one is apt to forget who hears it for the first time.

With Sabre and Scalpel. The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon John Allan 1914

The time when screech-owls cry, and ban-dogs howl,

Act I. Scene IV. The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth 1914

On a heap of grass fodder in a corner of the yard an all-but-naked expert in inharmony thumped a skin tom-tom with his knuckles, while at his feet the own-blood brother to the screech-owls wailed of hell's torments on a wind instrument.

Rung Ho Mundy, Talbot, 1879-1940 1914

The plague-swarm proceeded onwards; and the Podolian saw how the trees, the bushes, the owls, the screech-owls, assuming tall shapes, increased the multitude, the terrible harbinger of a frightful death.

Sixty Folk-tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources 1889

Owls, ospreys, screech-owls, all the different kinds of birds, with hooked beaks and round eyes, and silken wings that enable them to fly noiselessly, have their homes amongst the granites massively upheld in the air; and they are celebrating now, each after its own fashion, the nocturnal festival.

Egypt (La Mort de Philae) Pierre Loti 1886