fauna

The Brown Wood Owl (Strix leptogrammica)

… is a resident breeder in south Asia from India and Sri Lanka east to western Indonesia and south China. This species is a part of the family of owls known as typical owls (Strigidae), which contains most species of owl. It belongs to the earless owl genus Strix.

The Brown Wood Owl is medium large (45–57 cm), with upperparts uniformly dark brown, with faint white spotting on the shoulders. The underparts are buff with brown streaking.The sexes are similar. The call is a (hoo) hoo hoo HOO or a deep goke-goke-ga-LOOO or a loud scream. The alarm call is a bark, wow-wow.

It is an uncommon resident bird of dense forests. This species is very nocturnal but it can often be located by the small birds that mob it while it is roosting in a tree. It feeds mainly on small mammals birds and reptiles. It nests in a hole in a tree or on a forked trunk, laying two eggs…

(read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Wood_Owl)

(photos: T - Tanaka Juuyoh; BL - Simon J. Tonge; BR - Stijn Cooleman) http://eol.org/pages/1178287/media

Northern Saw-whet Owl (Aegolius acadicus)

by DC Birds Blog

At just 8 inches in length, the Northern Saw-whet Owl is one of the smallest owl species in North America. Like most owls, this species possesses short legs, rounded wings, large yellow eyes, and a disk-shaped face. Apart from its small size, it may best be identified by its brown body spotted with white above and streaked below as well as on the face.

The Northern Saw-whet Owl primarily breeds in Southern Canada and the northern tier of the United States. Breeding populations also exist at higher elevations in the western U.S.and in the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains in the southeast. During the winter, this species expands its range southward and into lower elevations, including the coastal southeast, the Great Plains, and the southwest.

The Northern Saw-whet Owl inhabits forests across the northern part of the continent. In particular, this owl prefers forests that are composed either entirely of evergreen trees or of a mix of evergreen and deciduous tree species. In winter, individuals which have moved south are less tied to a particular habitat type, relocating as new sources of prey become available. Like most owls, the Northern Saw-whet Owl hunts small mammals, including mice, shrews, and voles.

This owl uses its excellent hearing to locate prey on the ground in order to fly down and capture it with its talons. Also, like most owls, this species hunts almost exclusively at night, making it difficult to observe. Northern Saw-whet Owls are most visible roosting high in trees during the day or while producing toot-like calls at dusk.

(via: http://eol.org/pages/915740/overview)

(photos: TL - Kameron Perensovich; TR - Kent McFarland; B - juveniles - Kathy and Sam from beaverton, OR, USA)

astronomy-to-zoology:

Oriental Bay Owl (Phodilus badius)

…is a species of barn owl endemic to South and Southeastern Asia. Like most owls this species is nocturnal and hunts at night for small birds, mammals, reptiles and invertebrates. The Oriental Bay Owl currently has six subspecies which are defined by their range. One subspecies, P.b. riverae, was described on the island of Samar in the Philippines, it was only known from one specimen which was killed in 1945 by a bombing raid and as such it is presumed extinct.

Phylogeny

Animalia-Chordata-Aves-Strigiformes-Tytonidae-Phodilus-badius

Image Source(s)

Florida’s Burrowning Owls Keep it Undergound

by Amanda Williams

With coyotes lurking, stray dogs sniffing and raptors soaring above, you could forgive these wide-eyed burrowing owls for looking slightly nervous.

Using a camera hidden in a traffic cone photographer Mac Stone captured the magnificent birds, which nest in underground holes rather than in trees, in 20 attempts over six months.

The charming results show the wise creatures curiously gazing out over the grassland from their tunnelled habitat in Southern Florida…

(read more: The Daily Mail)    (photos: Caters News Agency)

Tough winter in Northern North America forces starving owls south in hunt for food

By STEVE KARNOWSKI

It’s been a tough winter for owls in parts of North America, and the evidence is turning up on roadsides, at bird feeders and at a wildlife rehabilitation center in Minnesota.

The dead, injured and sick owls are symptoms of what ornithologists call an “irruption,” a natural, cyclical phenomenon that happens when hungry owls that normally winter in northern Canada head south in search of food — either because their normal food of mice, voles and lemmings are in short supply or heavy snow cover makes it difficult to hunt for small rodents. Other irruptions have been reported recently in New England, as well as southern Ontario and Quebec, and parts of British Columbia.

This year it happens to be northern Minnesota that’s seeing much of the action and it’s mostly tiny boreal owls.

“They’re excruciatingly cute,” said Geoff LeBaron, director of the Christmas Bird Count program at the National Audubon Society.

As the owls flock to Minnesota, so do bird watchers. The prime owl habitat of the Sax-Zim Bog is about 45 miles northwest of Duluth, and it has an annual birding festival in February…

(read more: The Big Story - AP)            (photos: Jim Mone/AP)

Screech Owls and Blind Snakes, an Unlikely Mutualism

by Andrew Durso

In the 1970s and 80s, a pair of biologists at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Fred Gehlbach and Robert Baldridge, were studying screech owl nesting ecology. These small owls nest in tree cavities and eat a variety of small animals, from insects to mice. Like most raptorial birds, Eastern Screech Owls usually kill their prey before bringing it home to feed to their nestlings.

Gehlbach and Baldridge observed some of the screech owls in their study carrying live Texas Blindsnakes (Rena [formerly Leptotyphlops] dulcis) to their nests in experimental nest boxes like those used by wood ducks and bluebirds. When they checked the nests the next day, they found, to their surprise, between one and fifteen live blindsnakes living among the owl chicks in fourteen different nests! In some cases, the snakes lived with the baby owls for at least a week! Many of the blindsnakes bore scars from adult owl beaks, but few had been killed.

f you’re not familiar with blindsnakes (aka scolecophidians), don’t worry; few people are. There are about 400 species of these ‘seriously strange serpents’, as Darren Naish calls them over at TetZoo, distributed chiefly in the world’s tropical regions (the Texas Blindsnake is one of the few temperate exceptions). Most have small eyes (or none at all, as their name suggests), smooth round scales, and eat invertebrates. Their jaw architecture is entirely unique: their jaws act like little scoops to effectively shovel ant and termite larvae and pupae into their mouths.

(Check out the video from BBC’s Life in Cold Blood, or visit the homepage of blindsnake biologist Nate Kley at Stony Brook University.)

How does this help baby screech owls? Gehlbach and Baldridge wanted to find out, so they measured the diversity and abundance of invertebrates in the owl nests with and without live blindsnakes, as well as the health and survival of the baby owls (which they were already measuring). They found that nests with blindsnakes had significantly fewer mites, insects, and arachnids, and that baby owls from these nests were 25% more likely to survive and grew as much as 50% faster…

(read more: Life is Short, But Snakes Are Long)