Eastern Barn Owl | Tyto javanica

Voice

The characteristic sound is a long-drawn, hoarse hissing screech that can run to a dozen seconds and comes out of the dark without warning; it suggests tearing cloth more than a call. There are also whistling and wheezing notes, a rolling hiss at the nest, and loud bill-clacking in threat and courtship. Begging young give a sustained rasping snore that seems to come out of a hollow tree from a distance. This owl never gives a true hoot.

Identification

A medium-sized, slender owl with long wings and a large, sharply rimmed heart-shaped mask holding small dark brown eyes. The upperparts are sandy orange-brown clouded with light grey and finely dotted black and white, the underparts white to cream with even black speckling; females average darker and more spotted than males. In headlights or moonlight it looks almost entirely white. The legs are slim and feathered only about halfway down the tarsus, with sparse hair-like feathers below. Flight is light, slow and wavering, with much hovering, and the underwing is strikingly pale.

Confusion species

Australasian Masked Owl (Tyto novaehollandiae) is the main confusion: bulkier, with a heavier mask, thick legs feathered to the toes and coarse talons, darker on average and with a deeper, rawer screech; it belongs to forest, this one to open country. Eastern Grass Owl (Tyto longimembris) is dark chocolate brown above rather than golden, with extremely long thin legs trailing well past the tail in flight; it works over tall tussock grass and does not perch on posts. Greater Sooty Owl (Tyto tenebricosa) is dark sooty grey above and below. In New Zealand the only confusion is Morepork (Ninox novaeseelandiae), which is smaller, dark brown and yellow-eyed.

Habitat

Open and often dry country: farmland with scattered trees, heath, lightly timbered grassland and dry eucalypt woodland, out to the edges of towns and cities. It hunts from a fence post, wire or low branch, or hovering low over a verge, and roosts by day in a hollow tree, a cave, a rock crevice, a deserted shed or a dense crown. It nests almost always in a tree hollow, sometimes fifteen to twenty-five metres up, but a church tower, a mine shaft or a stack of hay serves just as well.

Range and movements

Across almost all of Australia, where only food and cover set the limits; it is absent from Tasmania. Numbers swing widely: inland it follows the rodent plagues that come after wet years and can then breed in thousands, after which drought pushes the birds out to the coast and north in numbers. In New Zealand it is a newcomer that arrived under its own power: after years of scattered records the first breeding was confirmed in Northland in 2008, and a small, growing population has held on there since. It also turns up on Norfolk Island and other islands in the map window.

• Resident
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Drive a country road through farmland slowly after dark and watch the verges: the pale shape hovering low in the headlights is this species nine times out of ten. In dry years check old sheds and water towers, and inland every hollow tree along a creek. Anyone who pulls apart pellets from beneath a roost will almost always be left with House Mouse skulls — that confirms the identification as well as the plumage does.

Conservation

Not threatened (LC): the range is enormous, the species adapts to farmland without effort and even gains from the introduced House Mouse, its chief prey. There are pressure points all the same. Second-generation rodenticides accumulate in owls that eat poisoned mice, and in districts with heavy mouse control this is measurable. Road deaths take a real toll, precisely because it likes to hunt over verges, and the loss of hollow trees in farmland limits nesting locally. Against that, it takes readily to nest boxes.

Scientific name

Tyto javanica | (Gmelin, 1788)

Gmelin described the species in 1788 as Strix javanica, with Java as the type locality; because it later moved to Tyto, author and year stand in parentheses. The genus Tyto was introduced by Billberg in 1828, from the Greek tuto, 'night owl'. The epithet simply means 'of Java'. Australian birds belong to the subspecies delicatula, described by Gould in 1837. Until recently all the barn owls of the world were lumped under Tyto alba; the eastern form has been split off, and it is that split the bird owes its English and Dutch names to.