Critically Endangered
Siau Scops Owl
Otus siaoensis
Siau Scops Owl is a bird in the family Strigidae (order Strigiformes) — Otus siaoensis, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to Indonesia.
Appearance
The taxonomic arrangement for this owl has not been fully worked out. While recognized as a distinct species by the IOU, others consider it a subspecies of either the Sulawesi scops owl or the Moluccan scops owl, and it has recently been analyzed and found to be closest in morphology to the Sangihe scops owl. On 14 December 2017, a video of a purported Siau scops owl trapped in a building was uploaded to YouTube (see external links).
Range and habitat
Nonetheless, their already small, relatively barren habitat is being lost to excessive logging of the little forest present on the island and there are assumed to be very few individuals left, if any.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
The Siau scops owl is a critically endangered owl species. The species is only known from a single holotype from 1866 although there have been more recent potential sightings, among them one in 2017.
Siau Scops Owl is Critically 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 Siau Scops Owl, Wikidata item Q775379. 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.
