**2. Methods**

The author spent between 1977 and 2010, almost 22 years, in Africa being a resident in six different countries and a workwise visitor in additional 40 countries. All that time, owl beliefs were recorded to some extent, but more detailed interview studies were undertaken in 20 central, eastern, southern, and western African countries by using a pretested interview form in English and Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique (see [5]).

A local person, Bob Milingo Mvula, undertook the most sensitive interviews with the randomly selected contemporary witchdoctors in Malawi, and a female wizard was interviewed by the author in the Gambia. Handwritten notes were kept from each interview following the Annex 1 questionnaire. A total of six male sorcerers were interviewed in Malawi on the use of owls for bewitching people. The sensitivity of the interviews came from the fact that all respondents thought first that Mr. Mvula wanted to become a witchdoctor himself. For that reason, they were reluctant to reveal the secrets, especially the ingredients of their poisonous bewitching medicine. Some thought that Mr. Mvula was too young to become a witchdoctor—so in some interviews, he had his old father with him. If he admitted that he was collecting the information for a "white man's" book, then all respondents required money for these secrets, but we did not have too much money for this. As one Malawian lady said before refusing the interview: "I can't give information without some money. This time things are no longer like in the past when whites used to collect information for nothing" [5]. During the 22 years in Africa, the author collected all noted witchdoctor-related newspaper articles, out of which some anecdotes have been published before [6–14]. **Table 1** gives the details of how owls were used as food, in traditional medicine, or as means of sorcery based on 794 interviews and 333 recorded owl killings in Africa.

**Table 2** shows further details on owl species known to be eaten in Africa, also indicating the rarity status of the species. **Table 3** has a global list of some known owl-related traditional medicines. It is important to note that the effectiveness of any of the listed medicines from owl parts has *not* been scientifically proven, nor even studied, and their potency in all cases may be more than questionable. They are
