Otus bakkamoena

Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve, Pench National Park, Tipeshwar Wildlife Sanctuary

Owls are birds from the order Strigiformes, which includes over 200 species of mostly solitary and nocturnal birds of prey typified by an upright stance, a large, broad head, binocular vision, binaural hearing, sharp talons, and feathers adapted for silent flight. Exceptions include the diurnal northern hawk-owl and the gregarious burrowing owl. Owls hunt mostly small mammals, insects, and other birds, although a few species specialise in hunting fish. They are found in all regions of the Earth except polar ice caps and some remote islands. Owls are divided into two families: the true (or typical) owl family, Strigidae, and the barn-owl family, Tytonidae.

I’ve had some amazing opportunities to photograph a few different species of owls over the years. Like always some were easy, some were all night stands, some were in the freezing cold, some were a long walk through dense jungles, with some there was light, with some there was none AND for one of them there was a Thermal Scope!

Read about my other owls:

1. A Parliament of Owls

2. Blakiston’s Fish Owl - the largest living species of owls in the world, an endangered species that lives in some of the hardest-to-reach corners of northeast Asia

3. The Ural Owl

4. Spotted Owlet

5. Short-eared Owl

But today is about the Indian Scops Owl. We were trundling around in the core forests of Turia within the Pench National Park and a few kilometers from the Totladoh Water Reservoir hunting tigers when we came across this specimen. We saw the Scops owl again further along the road and these are some of the photos.

Pench National Park

Pench National Park, nestled in the heart of India in the lower southern reaches of the Satpura hills, sprawls a massive 758 km² across the states of Madhya Pradesh & Maharashtra. In Madhya Pradesh it is located in the districts of Seoni and Chhindwara. Named after the pristine River Pench it was immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his Jungle Book. Every year millions make their way here to spot Akela (the Indian Wolf), Baloo (the Sloth Bear), Bagheera (the Black Panther) and Shere Khan (the Royal Bengal Tiger). It was declared a sanctuary in 1965 and elevated to the status of national park in 1975 and enlisted as a tiger reserve in 1992. The area has always been rich in wildlife dominated by fairly open canopy, mixed forests with considerable shrub cover and open grassy patches. The high habitat heterogeneity favours a high population of Chital and Sambhar. Pench tiger reserve has highest density of herbivores in India (90.3 animals per sq km).

Pench has a glorious history of natural wealth and unique cultural richness described in several classics ranging from the Ain-e-Akbari to the Jungle Book. Several natural history books like Strendale’s “Seonee - Camplife in the Satpuras” & Forsyth’s “Highlands of Central India” present a detailed panorama of these forests. 

Pench National Park was also the location used by the BBC for the innovative wildlife series Tiger: Spy in the Jungle, a three-part documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough which used concealed cameras, placed by elephants, in order to capture intimate tiger behaviour and also retrieved footage of various other fauna in the reserve. The programme aired for the first time in March 2008 and ended a month later.

The forest, lush and green in the monsoon, also harbours a wide range of faunal species some of which figure prominently in the IUCN Red List. Our story today is about the Indian Scops Owl which we spotted multiple times while going in and out of the park.

My grateful thanks to my companions - Angad, Rishi, Rahi & Golu - for bearing with me and my excesses. This would not have been possible without their help and incredible skills.

Indian Scops Owl

The Indian Scops Owl (Otus bakkamoena) is small owl with large, conspicuous ear-tufts with dark outer margins. It was formerly considered a subspecies of the Collared Scops Owl (Otus lettia) and it is a resident species of owl native to South Asia. The species epithet is derived from "bakamuna", the Sinhalese name for the white barn owl (Tyto alba), and the Brown Fish Owl (Ketupa zeylonensis).

It is distributed from South Pakistan, northwest Himalayas, India east to western Bengal, including Himalayas from Kashmir east to central Nepal, and south to Sri Lanka.

The Indian Scops Owl is one of the largest of the Scops Owls. The facial disc is a pale greyish-brown with a distinct blackish rim. The forehead & eyebrows are paler than the surrounding plumage while the eyes are hazel-brown to dark brown, and rarely yellowish-brown. The bill is greenish horn-brown, with a darker tip, and paler lower mandible and the cere is a dusky green. The crown is nearly uniform blackish, and distinctly darker than the mantle. Ear tufts are long and prominent with dark outer margins.

The upperparts are a uniform greyish-brown with darker and paler markings and long black streaks. Outer webs of the scapulars are a dirty cream or whitish-buff, and are not very prominent and do not form a distinct scapular stripe. The flight and tail feathers are inconspicuously barred lighter and darker. The underparts are ochre-buff, becoming paler towards the belly, with relatively few dark shaft-streaks and wavy cross-bars, especially on the upper breast and flanks. The legs are feathered pale greyish-brown to white to the base of the toes while the toes are coloured brownish-flesh to greenish-yellow and have pale horn-brown claws.

The Indian Scops Owl is nocturnal. Through its natural camouflage, it is very difficult to see in daytime, but may sometimes be located by the small birds that mob it while it is roosting in a tree. It feeds mainly on insects including beetles and grasshoppers. They will also occasionally take vertebrates such as lizards, mice and small birds. The call is a soft single note ("whuk?"). Little is known about the breeding biology of this owl. They nest in tree cavities at moderate height. Females lay 3-4 white roundish eggs averaging 33x27mm.

The Indian Scops Owl lives in forest and secondary woodland, desert vegetation, and groups of densely foliaged trees in gardens, mango orchards and other fruit trees around villages and cultivations. Ranges from lowlands to 2200m elevation.

With that said lets move onto the gallery of this beautiful nocturnal bird.

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