OWL AND FROGMOUTH

SHORTEARED OWL
SIZE pigeon; length 40cm (16 in).
FIELD CHARACTERS A slim medium-sized owl with two short upstanding blackish ‘horns” above the staring yellow eyes. Pale buff overall, heavily streaked with dark brown, and with darker grayish head. Facial disc whitish, bordered by a dark brown ruff. Wings and tail barred rufous and black. Below, pale buff, streaked with brown on breast. In flight, the pointed wings, largely rufous above whitish below, with black tips and a dark bar across each surface, are diagnostic pointers.
SEXES alike.
HABITAT Irregular winter visitor (October to March) and passage migrant. Low country, duars, foothills, and up to 1400 m. undulating grasslands and hill slopes dotted with bushes. Solos or loosely scattered in parties. More diurnal than most owls, occasionally even hunting in daytime. Normally settles and roosts on the ground. Flies with deliberate full wing beats.
FOOD field-rats and mice, lizards, grasshoppers and other large insects.
CALL none recorded; very silent in winter quarters.

HODGSON’S FROGMOUTH
SIZE Myna, length 25cm (10 in).
FIELD CHARACTERS an obliterating colored nightjar like bird with exaggeratedly wide gape and broad swollen horny bill, aptly suggestive of a frog’s mouth. Male gray-brown vermiculated and mottled with white, buff, brown, black and chestnut. Scapulars with broad white patches. Tail with pale and dark mottled cross-bands. Female of same camouflaging pattern, but chestnut-rufous overall instead of gray-brown. A more or less distinct white band across throat. A whitish collar round hind neck.
STATUS, HABITAT, ETC; Resident; rare, nocturnal and little known. Affects subtropical evergreen forest between 300 and 1800 m. Spends the daytime in thick jungle perched singly, upright and motionless, on a stump or low branch admirably disguised as a lichen-covered snag.
FOOD moths, beetles and other large insects, hawked in air or taken on ground or from branches.
CALL imperfectly known. Described as a soft rapid kooroo, kooroo, kooroo, and variously.

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