New Species of Owl Discovered by Distinctive Whistle in Indonesia

A new species of owl of the genus Otus has been discovered in a small Indonesian island, researchers reported today in PLoS ONE.

Not that Otus Jolandae (as the owl was baptized) was hiding all this time. Actually it has lived in plain sight all along. And though it resembles other owls living in the foothills of Lombok Island and the its neighbors, O. Jolandae has a very distinctive whistle tune.

And it was the bird’s unique tune that called attention to researchers, who after thorough investigation found that it was a different species of scop owls.

“Scops owls are small, nocturnal forest inhabitants, whose presence in an area is very easily missed unless they are calling,” said Per Alstrom, a taxonomist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who was not a member of the owl-finding team. “The authors have done very thorough analyses of both morphology and vocalizations, and found the new scops owl to be significantly different from all other known species.”

Through the years, Otus Jolandae had been lumped in with its neighbor Otus magicus. A mistake committed by British naturalist Alfred Everett, a civil servant who had been stationed in Borneo in 1896, and collected several of the birds and sent the specimens to museums.

The error perpetuated for more than a hundred years, until 2003, when taxonomist George Sangster and his wife Jolanda were visiting Lombok’s forests. Sangster, a graduate student at Sweden’s Stockholm University, was there to record the songs of a different bird, the nightjar.

“On the very first night, just a few hours after my wife and I arrived on Lombok, we heard the vocalizations of an owl that we were not familiar with,” Sangster said. “Initially, we thought it was perhaps a previously known species from Java and Bali, that for some reason had been overlooked on Lombok.”

Sangster recorded the owl and played its songs into the forest. When the owls approached, he saw that they looked nothing like the owls on Java or Bali. Instead, they resembled O. magicus, which lives on the islands to Lombok’s east.

Something was wrong, though.

“Its whistle sounded completely different from the raven-like croak of that species,” Sangster recalled. “At home, I learned that no one had given a name yet to the scops owls on Lombok, which was the first time I realized that this might indeed be an entirely new species.”