Kay's Gallery:   Southern Boobook (3/5)

STRIGIFORMES: Strigidae

Ninox novaeseelandiae  

J A Leach on the Boobook:

The Boobook Owl, though not often seen, calls "Mopoke," which sounded like "Boobook" to the aboriginal ear, but became "Cuckoo"--the best-loved bird-call of their far-distant home to the ears of the homesick first white residents. And was it not, they asked, what one might expect in a country where Christmas came at the wrong time of the year, where the trees were always green, and shed their bark instead of their leaves--where the leaves grew vertically, instead of horizontally, and so gave no shade--was it not natural that the Cuckoo, a day bird in England, should become a night bird in this land of paradoxes and contradictions? Thus Australia's reputation was added to even by the Boobook Owl.

An Australian Bird Book, 1912, 2nd Ed. p75.
by J A Leach, M.Sc (1870-1929).