{"id":1052941,"date":"2026-09-09T12:18:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1052941\/"},"modified":"2026-09-09T12:18:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T12:18:20","slug":"new-owl-species-discovered-in-peru","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1052941\/","title":{"rendered":"New Owl Species Discovered in Peru"},"content":{"rendered":"

A horned owl living in a narrow strip of high-Andean grassland in northern Peru is a species new to science, according to a paper published in July 2026 in the journal Audiornis<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

The Jalca horned owl (Bubo jalca). Image credit: L\u00f3pez-Lan\u00fas et al.<\/p>\n

The newly described owl species belongs to the genus Bubo<\/a>, a group that includes over 10 species of American horned owls and Old World eagle-owls.<\/p>\n

Named Bubo jalca (common name is the Jalca horned owl), the bird inhabits the jalca<\/a>, a cold, high-elevation grassland and cloud-forest habitat restricted to the Huancabamba Depression, a geographic dip in the Peruvian Andes that separates the p\u00e1ramo ecosystem to the north from the puna to the south.<\/p>\n

\u201cBubo jalca is a particularly rare taxon, or at least a very scarce one, within its area of occurrence: the jalca and the adjacent cloud forest,\u201d said Universidad Nacional de Piura ornithologist Armando Ugaz Cherre and his colleagues Argentina and Peru.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo date, no photographs of the species are known, an indirect reflection of its singularity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In plumage and body measurements, Bubo jalca is essentially indistinguishable from its closest relative, Bubo nigrescens, which lives in the p\u00e1ramo habitat in Ecuador and Colombia.<\/p>\n

What sets the new species apart, according to the researchers, is its call.<\/p>\n

\u201cIts call is distinguishable both aurally and by phrase structure on spectrograms and oscillograms and is therefore diagnostic,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt utters a rapid \u2018j\u00e9-cu!\u2019 with emphasis on the first syllable, rather than the prolonged trisyllabic \u2018cus-c\u00fan-go\u2019 of the male Bubo nigrescens (with stress on the middle syllable), or the rapid bisyllabic \u2018tu-c\u00fa\u2019 of both sexes of Bubo magellanicus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The formal description of Bubo jalca is based on a female specimen collected in July 1980 near Cruz Blanca, about 33 km by road southwest of Huancabamba, at roughly 3,050 m elevation.<\/p>\n

The specimen is held at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, and matching sound recordings of the same individual are archived at the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.<\/p>\n

The authors describe Bubo jalca as facing serious conservation concerns because of its narrow range.<\/p>\n

They point to the expansion of pine plantations into jalca grassland and to deforestation of adjacent cloud forest.<\/p>\n

\u201cBubo jalca is considered to face serious conservation threats as an extremely range-restricted species, whose persistence depends not only upon the jalca (recently undergoing an accelerating invasion by pine plantations), but also upon the adjoining cloud forest, itself under imminent threat of deforestation,\u201d they concluded.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

Bernab\u00e9 L\u00f3pez-Lan\u00fas et al. 2026. Confirmation of a new owl species (Strigidae: Bubo) endemic to the jalca of the Huancabamba Andean Depression, Peru. Audiornis 6: 2-53<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A horned owl living in a narrow strip of high-Andean grassland in northern Peru is a species new…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1052942,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[27],"tags":[157142,25236,93105,421697,421698,421699,13136,421700,421701,421702,421703,211297,3416,159,4217,421704,67,132,68,410248,837],"class_list":["post-1052941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-andes","tag-bird","tag-bubo","tag-bubo-jalca","tag-bubo-magellanicus","tag-bubo-nigrescens","tag-call","tag-horned-owl","tag-huancabamba-depression","tag-jalca","tag-jalca-horned-owl","tag-owl","tag-peru","tag-science","tag-south-america","tag-strigidae","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-vocalization","tag-wildlife"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117241048892381219","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1052941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052941\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1052942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1052941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1052941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1052941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}