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Mottled Owl | Strix virgata
Bonte bosuil | Búho café
The Mottled Owl is a medium-sized forest owl without ear tufts, ranging from Mexico to northern Argentina. In the Caribbean it occurs only on Trinidad. It used to be placed in the genus Ciccaba; its transfer to Strix is not followed by all authors. It is strictly nocturnal.
Voice
The territorial call is a series of deep, emphatic hoots, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, often in a fixed rhythm. Also a hoarse, drawn-out scream, keeeeeh, whistles and hissing sounds.
Recording: David Ruíz Domínguez — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
28–36 cm, with a round head without ear tufts and large, dark brown eyes. The facial disc is pale brown with whitish eyebrows and a pale area around the bill. Crown, nape and back are mottled and speckled in various shades of dark brown. Throat, breast and belly are off-white to buff with distinct dark brown streaks; the upper breast is often darker brown. There is also a dark morph with buff breast and belly. The tail is dark with narrow pale bars.
Confusion species
Spectacled Owl Pulsatrix perspicillata is much larger, with yellow eyes, a dark breast band and a plain belly. Tropical Screech Owl Megascops choliba is much smaller, with short ear tufts and yellow eyes. American Barn Owl Tyto furcata has a white heart-shaped disc with smaller eyes and pale, barely marked underparts.
Habitat
Forest of various types: rainforest, moist forest in the hills and mountains, forest edge and older secondary forest, also cacao and coffee plantations under shade trees. It hunts from a perch for small mammals, including bats, and birds, reptiles, frogs and large insects. It nests in a tree cavity or sometimes in an old nest of another bird, laying one or two eggs.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
In the region only a resident on Trinidad, fairly common in forested areas, especially in the Northern Range. Not recorded on Tobago. Outside the region from Mexico through Central and South America to northern Argentina.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Best at night along forest edges and forest roads in the Northern Range, listening for the deep hoots; a bird perched on a roadside branch sometimes allows good views in torchlight. By day it roosts hidden in dense foliage.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The species occurs in a range of forest types and can also live in plantations with trees, but depends on forest.
Scientific name
Strix virgata | (Cassin, 1849)
Cassin described the species in 1849 as Syrnium virgatum; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Strix was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Strix is the Latin word for 'owl'; in classical lore the strix was a night bird said to suck the blood of infants. virgata is Latin for 'striped', after the streaked underparts. The specimen the first description was based on came from Bogotá, Colombia (later restricted).