Owl (St Hugh's Choir, Lincoln Cathedral)

‘Noctua the Owl is called a Noctua because it flies about by night. It cannot see by day, because its sight is weakened by the rising splendour of the sun’.

(Words from T.H. White’s translation of a Latin prose bestiary, copied in the twelfth century by Jacobus Thomas Herison at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire).