The brown fish owl is a fish owl species in the family known as typical owls, Strigidae. It is native from Turkey to South and Southeast Asia. Due its wide distribution it is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List. It inhabits forests and wooded wetlands. Of the four living species of fish owl, it is the most widely distributed, most common and best-studied. It occupies a range of over 7,000 km (4,300 mi).
Blakiston's fish owl, the largest living species of owl, is a fish owl, a sub-group of eagle-owls which specialize in hunting in riparian areas. It is native to China, Japan, and the Russian Far East. This species is a part of the family known as typical owls (Strigidae), which contains most species of owl. Blakiston's fish owl and three related species were previously placed in the genus Ketupa; however, mtDNA cytochrome b sequence data is equivocal on which of the two genus names is more appropriately applied for this species. Its habitat is riparian forest with large, old trees for nest sites that is near lakes, rivers, springs, and shoals that do not freeze in winter. Henry Seebohm named this bird after the English naturalist Thomas Blakiston, who collected the original specimen in Hakodate on Hokkaidō, Japan in 1883.
The Ural owl is a large nocturnal owl. It is a member of the true owl family, Strigidae. The Ural owl is a member of the genus Strix, that is also the origin of the family’s name under Linnaean taxonomy. Both its common name and scientific name refer to the Ural Mountains of Russia where the type specimen was collected. However, this species has an extremely broad distribution that extends as far west as much of Scandinavia, montane eastern Europe, and, sporadically, central Europe, thence sweeping across the Palearctic broadly through Russia to as far east as Sakhalin and throughout Japan. The Ural owl may include up to 15 subspecies, but most likely the number may be slightly fewer if accounting for clinal variations.
Strix is a genus of owls in the typical owl family (Strigidae), one of the two generally accepted living families of owls, with the other being the barn-owl (Tytonidae). Common names are earless owls or wood owls, though they are not the only owls without ear tufts, and "wood owl" is also used as a more generic name for forest-dwelling owls. Neotropical birds in the genus Ciccaba are sometimes included in Strix.
The African scops owl is a small owl which is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa.
The spotted wood owl is an owl of the earless owl genus, Strix. Its range is disjunct; it occurs in many regions surrounding Borneo, but not on that island itself.
The African wood owl or Woodford's owl, is a typical owl from the genus Strix in the family Strigidae which is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Cape eagle-owl is a species of owl in the family Strigidae. It is one of several large species of the eagle-owl genus Bubo.
Fraser's eagle-owl is a species of African owl in the family Strigidae. It is named after the British zoologist Louis Fraser.
Shelley's eagle-owl is a species of owl in the family Strigidae. Despite its large size, it is a very little-known, rarely studied owl that occurs in very small numbers. A specimen was photographed in the wild for the first time on 16 October 2021 in the Atewa Range Forest Reserve in southeastern Ghana.
The barred eagle-owl, also called the Malay eagle-owl, is a species of eagle owl in the family Strigidae. It is a member of the large genus Bubo which is distributed on most of the world's continents. This relatively little-known species is found from the southern Malay Peninsula down a string of several of the larger southeast Asian islands to as far as Borneo. It forms a superspecies with the physically similar but larger spot-bellied eagle-owl, although the two species appear to be allopatric in distribution.
The Usambara eagle-owl, also called the East African nduk eagle-owl or Vosseier's eagle-owl, is a taxon of owl in the family Strigidae. It is now regarded as a subspecies of Fraser's eagle-owl. It is endemic to the Usambara Mountains in Tanga Region of Tanzania.
The East Brazilian pygmy owl, also known as least pygmy-owl or Sick's pygmy-owl, is a small owl in the typical owl family.
The greyish eagle-owl or vermiculated eagle-owl is a rather large owl of the northern part of sub-Saharan Africa. It was previously regarded as the northern subspecies of the spotted eagle-owl.
The tawny owl, also called the brown owl, is commonly found in woodlands across Europe to western Siberia, and has seven recognized subspecies. It is a stocky, medium-sized owl, whose underparts are pale with dark streaks, and whose upper body may be either brown or grey. The tawny owl typically makes its nest in a tree hole where it can protect its eggs and young against potential predators. It is non-migratory and highly territorial: as a result, when young birds grow up and leave the parental nest, if they cannot find a vacant territory to claim as their own, they will often starve.
The Andaman masked owl is a barn owl endemic to the southern Andaman Islands, an archipelago between India and Myanmar, in the Bay of Bengal. Regarded by some authors as a subspecies of the common barn owl, it is recognized by others as a species in its own right.
The Timor boobook is a species of owl in the family Strigidae. It is found on Timor, Roma, Leti and Semau Islands in the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia.
The tawny owl is an opportunistic and generalized predator. Peak hunting activity tends to occur largely between dusk to midnight, with owls often following an erratic hunting pattern, perhaps to sites where previous hunts were successful. When feeding young, hunting may need to be prolonged into daylight in the early morning. Based on hand-reared young owls that re-released into the wild, hunting behaviour is quite innate rather than learned. Normally this owl hunts from a perch. Perching bouts usually last from about 8 to 14 minutes depending largely on habitat. Tawny owl's hunting from a perch or pole can recall a buzzard and the two take similar prey sizes as well. However, high initial speed and maneuvering among trees and bushes with great dexterity may allow it to surprise relatively large prey, more like a goshawk. The tawny owl is capable of lifting and carrying off in flight individual prey weighing up to at least 320 g (11 oz). Their middle talon, the most enlarged claw on owls, measures an average of 19.1 mm (0.75 in). While not as large as those of the Ural owl, the talons are extremely sharp, stout and quite decurved. The claws are considered to be visibly more overdeveloped than those of other European mid-sized owls and the footspan including the claws is fairly larger as well, at an average of about 13.4 cm (5.3 in). The hunting owl often extends its wings to balance and control prey upon impact. Alternatively, this species may hunt from flight. This occurs from 2 to 3 m over the ground, often over open habitats such as bushes, marsh or grassland, forming a quartering or zigzag pattern over the opening. During these flights they cover about 30 to 50 m before changing direction. Hunting from flight was surprisingly prevalent in a Swedish study of two radio-tagged birds, with 34% of study time spent hunting from flight while 40% of the study time was spent on hunting from a perch. In a similar study in England, less than 1% of time was spent hunting from flight. In a more deliberate variation of hunting from flight, the hunting owl may examine crags and nest boxes or also hover around prey roosts. In the latter type of hunts, the tawny owls may strike branches and/or beat their wings together in front of denser foliage, bushes or conifers in order to disturb and flush prey such as small birds and bats, or may dive directly into said foliage. Hovering has also been recorded in differing circumstances, including one incidence of an owl hunting a small bird that was caught on the wing after a hovering flight. Tawny owls have also taken bats on the wing as well and have been seen to hawk large, relatively slow-flying insects such as some beetles and moths in flight. Caterpillars may too be taken from trees. Usually these hunting variations are correlated with poor weather hampering the capture of preferred prey. Tawny owls eat worms with relative frequency, as they often hear them apparently from below the surface and snatch them up from shallow dirt or below leaf litter. Their worm-hunting style recalls worm hunting techniques by most other birds and they were recorded to eat 0.39 worms per minute during an hour of observation in England and were sometimes seen to feed on worms during daylight. Other hunting from the ground has been observed, often of insects such as beetles, but tawny owls have also been reported to "leap" upon from a ground vantage point in order to capture a vole, quite like foxes often do. There are now many accounts of tawny owls feeding on carrion from a wide range of sources, including hares, rats, sheep, and trout.
The species was first described by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758 under its current scientific name. The binomial derives from Greek strix "owl" and Italian allocco, "tawny owl". Some early descriptions upon review were found to have somehow conflated the very different barn owl with the scientific name Strix aluco, which in turn engendered some confusion.
Tawny owls are monogamous and territorial year around. Young birds select territories and look for mates in autumn and tend to be very vocal, especially males. Due to their highly territorial behaviour, young birds frequently struggle to establish a territory unless a nearby adult dies. Males routinely engage in territorial fights. Territories have been known to have been maintained by single tawnys for up to 10 years in Russia and 13 years in Berlin. Of 34 males in Wytham, only one male moved off of territory, due to being disturbed by humans. It appears to be largely up to the male to select territorial boundaries. Despite the aforementioned territorial behaviour, active nests of two separate pairs at as close as 100 m (330 ft), in the Tegel forest, have been reported. This species shows very little extrapair parentage. In Switzerland for example, a study of 137 nestings found that only one, or 0.7%, were from a different father than the mate, females cannot generally raise young without male contribution so the pair structure of these highly residential owls insures little instance of cuckoldry. Cases of bigamy were reported at Wytham in 6 of 34 males, in situations where apparently a neighboring male died and was suffixed subsequently, however, one or the other nesting attempts would completely fail each time. In Pavia, 3 of 22 territories included two mature females.
