Tracking with a GPS device has revealed that a northern boobook, an owl species, flew more than 1,800 kilometers nonstop over the sea from Japan to the Philippines, according to a study by a research team including Tohoku University.
The owl species is about 30 centimeters in body length. In Japan, it lives in a wide range of places and breeds in parks in urban areas during the summer, among other locations.
Although it has been found that the owl species spends winters in Southeast Asia, its migratory routes have not been known in detail.
For the study, the researchers attached small GPS data loggers to four northern boobooks that lived in Sendai.
An analysis last summer of data collected from one of the four showed that the male bird traveled south over the Japanese archipelago in late October 2024. It then flew 1,848 kilometers from Cape Sata, Kagoshima Prefecture, to the Philippine island of Luzon nonstop over the sea in a 36-hour trip in early November the same year.
The owl later spent some four months on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan during winter before traveling some 1,500 km to the southern China island of Hainan in late March 2025. After flying north over continental China, it returned to Sendai in late April.
The study “revealed a new aspect of owls running counter to people’s notion that they don’t move,” said Yawara Takeda, a Tohoku University researcher specializing in developmental biology.
“If its migratory routes and resting locations are identified, that would help preserve the species,” Takeda said.
The study was published in the British scientific journal Animal Biotelemetry in June.