Well, it's not laughing any more. The Laughing Owl, sometimes called the scoundrel owl, lived only in New Zealand and got its name because it had a call that sounded for all the world like a burst of maniacal laughter. Frankly, if you were a frightened settler in a strange land, and something swooped through the night emitting demonic giggles, you'd probably try and wipe it out too. Turns out that the European settlers were made of sterner stuff, however, as it wasn't so much the humans that hunted these little demon birds to extinction, but the cats that they brought with them. As is usually the way, the Laughing Owl was extinct within 50 years of humans poking their noses in, with the last ones thought to have disappeared around 1914.
