Endangered
Serendib Scops Owl
Otus thilohoffmanni
This owl has no competition from other nocturnal birds, as the territories are completely different.
Appearance
The Serendib scops owl is the most recently discovered bird of Sri Lanka. The Serendib scops owl usually lives in in the southern rainforests of Sri Lanka. This owl has no competition from other nocturnal birds, as the territories are completely different.
The general colour of this 16.5 cm (6.5 in) long, short-tailed owl is reddish-brown with paler underparts, spotted all over with fine black markings. Tarsi are feathered for less than half their length.
Range and habitat
It was originally located by its unfamiliar poo-ooo call in the Kitulgala rainforest by prominent Sri Lankan ornithologist Deepal Warakagoda. Apart from Sinharaja and Kitulgala, it has also been found at Runakanda Reserve in Morapitiya and Eratna Gilimale. It is also the 24th (according to some authorities the 27th) endemic bird species for Sri Lanka.
The places that it is expected to be found are in five protected areas, like the Forest Reserve or the Proposed Reserve of Sri Lanka.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Like most owls, it is strictly nocturnal and hunts insects (e.g. Beetles and moths) close to the ground.
In crisis
This species has a very small population: at the end of January 2006 only 80 of them were known to exist.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Serendib Scops Owl is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Serendib Scops Owl, Wikidata item Q1265965. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
