
A horned owl living in a narrow strip of high-Andean meadow in northern Peru is a types brand-new to science, according to a paper released in July 2026 in the journal Audiornis
The Jalca horned owl(Bubo jalca. Image credit: López-Lanús et al
The freshly explained owl types comes from the genus Buboa group that consists of over 10 types of American horned owls and Old World eagle-owls.
Called Bubo jalca (typical name is the Jalca horned owl ), the bird occupies the jalca, a cold, high-elevation meadow and cloud-forest environment limited to the Huancabamba Depression, a geographical dip in the Peruvian Andes that separates the páramo environment to the north from the puna to the south.
Bubo jalca is an especially uncommon taxon, or a minimum of an extremely limited one, within its location of incident: the jalca and the surrounding cloud forest,” stated Universidad Nacional de Piura ornithologist Armando Ugaz Cherre and his associates Argentina and Peru.
“To date, no pictures of the types are understood, an indirect reflection of its singularity.”
In plumage and body measurements, Bubo jalca is basically identical from its closest relative, Bubo nigrescenswhich resides in the páramo environment in Ecuador and Colombia.
What sets the brand-new types apart, according to the scientists, is its call.
“Its call is appreciable both aurally and by expression structure on spectrograms and oscillograms and is for that reason diagnostic,” they stated.
“It says a fast ‘jé-cu!’ with focus on the very first syllable, instead of the extended trisyllabic ‘cus-cún-go’ of the male Bubo nigrescens (with tension on the middle syllable), or the quick bisyllabic ‘tu-cú’ of both sexes of Bubo magellanicus“
The official description of Bubo jalca is based upon a female specimen gathered in July 1980 near Cruz Blanca, about 33 km by roadway southwest of Huancabamba, at approximately 3,050 m elevation.
The specimen is held at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, and matching sound recordings of the very same person are archived at the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The authors explain Bubo jalca as dealing with major preservation issues since of its narrow variety.
They indicate the growth of pine plantations into jalca meadow and to logging of nearby cloud forest.
Bubo jalca is thought about to deal with severe preservation hazards as a very range-restricted types, whose perseverance depends not just upon the jalca (just recently going through a speeding up intrusion by pine plantations), however likewise upon the adjacent cloud forest, itself under impending risk of logging,” they concluded.
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Bernabé López-Lanús et al2026. Verification of a brand-new owl types (Strigidae: Buboendemic to the jalca of the Huancabamba Andean Depression, Peru. Audiornis 6: 2-53
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