OWLS OF THE WORLD

Fireflies floated in low bushes, and giant insects buzzed past our ears and through holes in the canopy. Native DISCOVERY OF A pigeons coming in to roost grunted like little pigs. The guide stopped at some NEW jagged graywhite pieces of limestone OWL SPECIES: laid against the large trunk of a deciduous tree and whispered: "Here people pray to the gods for good THE LITTLE hunting in this forest." The bird hunters on this mountain would rest at the SUMBA HAWK limestone altar and speak to their OWL ancestors. We waited for a moment, listening to the forest, and then pulled a portable cassette player from our pack. In the by Jerry Olsen high grove we stood in a huddle and & Susan Trost broadcast the voice of an unknown owl, a single repeated "hoot," like a child blowing the same note every three seconds on a flute. The island of Sumba is located at the crosshairs of 10° South and 120° East

along the Lesser Sunda chain in

southeastern Indonesia. The island is 130 miles (210 km) long with a surface area of about 4632 square miles (12,000 In December 2001. for the second time square km); at 4019 feet (1225 m), the in six months, we visited the island of highest point is Gunung (Mount) Sumba in Indonesia. The coast of Wangameti. The island experiences a Sumba, and its main town Waingapu. dry winter and a wet summer season, was stifling and uncomfortable, but the and annual rainfall is between 20 inches islands high plateau was cooler. At (500 mm) on the south coast and 79 dusk on our second night there, our inches (2000 mm) on the inland hills. Sumbanese guide (he asked not to be Closed-canopy forest, mostly deciduous named) led us through mountain forest with some evergreen, now covers less up a steep muddy trail to a grassed- than 11 % of Sumba and, due to the over flat at the top of a hill. clearing and repeated burning of vegetation to provide land for grazing and cultivation, this forest is confined to relatively small and fragmented pockets. 80 Since the late 1980s, ornithologists have written of an unknown owl on

THE NATURE OF OWLS

Sumba, apparently a scops owl, the large A newly discovered group of tiny owls with ear tufts, that owl species-the occurs over most of the world except Sumba hawk ow1. Australasia. Some ornithologists, such as Stephen Debus, had written that we should, with some urgency, find and describe this scops owl, and determine its conservation status, that is, what it was, and how safe it was after so many trees had been cleared from Sumba. Some writers dismissed the reports of the little owl as a misidentification of the relatively large, endemic Sumba boobook, a medium-sized hawk owl with dramatic rufous bars across its front. But recent writers said that the bird was more down to Kilometer 49, west of the town of likely the Flores scops owl, Flores being Waingapu on the Lewa Road, a place where the big island 28 miles (45 km) north of birdwatchers had heard the mystery owl. We Sumba. The song of this unknown pulled the car to the edge, and our driver Sumba owl was unlike any known scops stayed with it. By moonlight and torch we owl, and the song of the Flores scops owl walked a ridge covered with scorched was unknown, and still is unknown at the grassland and scattered grav limestone pieces time of writing, so ornithologists some 800 metres to an isolated arm of a thought that the two owls were the forest, then found our way between high same. However, one ornithologist, Ben trees. Waist-high shards of limestone poked King, played the song of the unknown up through bushes, vines and around tree Sumba owl on a Flores mountainside trunks, so we took care not to stumble. At near the place where the Flores scops 18:30 hours, from a grassy clearing, Sue owl had recently been rediscovered. He broadcast the taped voice of the mystery owl. failed to elicit a response. Moreover, the At first we waited and heard nothing and Flores scops owl has ear tufts, a prepared to be disappointed once more, characteristic of scops owls, but the listening to croaky gecko calls, churring night mystery owls seen on Sumba had no insects, and the coos and grunts of roosting visible ear tufts. pigeons. After 10 minutes, two owls called For half an hour we played the tape in back at us, and we tracked them as they the grove where our guide said he had drifted down the hillside from tree to tree to seen the mystery owl some weeks earlier. the forest edge, concealing themselves behind But no owls replied, and after standing leaves and branches in the canopy. While for another half hour in the dark and Sue listening to geckos and insects, we decided to walk back to the car and drive t he twisting road 81

OWLS OF THE WORLD played the recording down in the clearing, analyzed nuclear marker genes to determine our Sumbanese guide and I entered the which taxonomic group the owl belonged to. forest with the camera, pulling at,6nes It was not a scops owl but a hawk owl like the between jagged tips of limestone. trying to southern boobook that we studied and knew glimpse the hidden owls and hopefully take well in Canberra, however, this little owl some video. The two owls were shy of us, and differed from southern boobooks by 8.2% each time we drew close enough to see them nucleotide substitutions and from the brown in the torch beam. they moved behind leaves hawk owl of east and southeast Asia by 9.1 % or flew to another tree. But after some nucleotide substitutions. The owl differed in minutes the two owls settled, and one sat other ways from all known hawk owls: it was directly over our heads and called to the smaller, and most hawk owls have a double- unfamiliar voice coming from Sue's recorder. noted call like the European cuckoo, the call The owl was reddish, the size of a quail, and put into cuckoo clocks, but the song of the had loose feathers and bright staring eves, like new owl was a single note, a monosyllabic flat yellow buttons, on the front of its face. "hoot" they repeated every three seconds. The owl had no ear tufts, as scops owls are There is no similar song known for any hawk supposed to have, and we realized that the owl. owl might be a different species, maybe a new We proposed for the new owl a common species of hawk owl. name, the Little Sumba hawk owl, and a Over the next two weeks we returned scientific name - Ninox sumbaensis (the with our guide and located two other pairs in "hawk owl from Sumba"), but said in our adjacent forest. One was accompanied by a research paper that its conservation status dependent juvenile that flew with them in the was unknown. We hope that with too little canopy and called for food. On December forest in its native place, the little Sumba 30, 2001, our guide showed us a specimen of hawk owl doesn't go the way of the laughing the little owl that he said a bird hunter had owl in New Zealand and the Norfolk Island shot in a patch of forest 2.5 miles (4 km) east boobook of Australia, but instead, with its of the patch we had been watching. We flute-like call, is allowed to live and defend its studied, measured and photographed it, then high forest sanctuaries on the island of returned that night to Kilometer 49 and Sumba. found all three of our pairs still calling from their forest territories, some distance from the place where the bird hunter had killed the owl that turned out to provide the first description of its species. When Professor Michael Wink at the University of Heidelberg in Germany received feathers from the specimen, he

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