1, the night owl cried
There is a folk saying in our country that "night owls enter the house, but they are afraid of night owls laughing if they are not afraid of their barking". Owls are often regarded as "ominous birds", called soul-chasing birds and mourning birds. In ancient books, they are also called strange owls, ghost cars, ghosts or wanderers as symbols of bad luck and death.
The main reason for these opinions is that owls can sniff out terminally ill people because of their keen sense of smell, and they will laugh. In many places, there is no superstition that owls will die within a few days after hearing their cries, so owls are called mourning birds.
2. Ghostly crying and howling
The owl's cry in the dark is as gloomy and desolate as a ghost, which makes people feel even more horrible. In ancient times, it was called "a bird with a bad voice". There is a fable in Shuo Yuan Xiao Ming's Moving to the East: "When an owl meets a pigeon, it says: I will move, but the west hates my voice ...".
In addition, owls lie down during the day, go out at night, and fly quietly like ghosts, and often only see a flash of shadow, which makes it easy for people who don't know much about their behavior to have all kinds of terrible associations.
Westerners like the sound of owls.
This contradictory concept can also be found in Shakespeare at that time. In his plays Julius Caesar and Macbeth, he predicted death with the cry of an owl; However, in the play in the futility of love, the owl sang a "happy song".
In eastern and western cultures, the meaning of owl is opposite. People in China think that owls are unpleasant to listen to, and it is unlucky to be active at night. But in western culture, the owl is a symbol of wisdom, and the messenger used to deliver letters in Harry Potter is the owl.
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