Hoot and Screech: From Giant Owls to Little Elves

There is something magisterial about big owls that make them even more impressive than the monarch of raptors, the golden eagle. Not only do they have better posture, but they also stare down haughtily and directly with great golden-yellow or burning orange eyes and carry none of the clumsy bulkiness of eagles. We’re fortunate in India to have five or six species of large owls and meeting them is always a privilege. In the 1980s and 1990s, when annual trips to Keoladeo National Park (aka Bharatpur) were de rigueur for me, a sure question we would ask of our guide was whether the dusky horned owl (Bubo coromandus) was in residence (now called the dusky eagle-owl). A pair was nesting on a kadam tree in the middle of the Sapanmari waterbody. If you waited respectfully enough, you’d see a couple of erect ear tufts sticking out from their home’s twiggy edifice, followed by a pair of golden-yellow eyes peering over the rim. If you were lucky, you’d see the whole bird (around 60 cm tall) slowly rise from the nest, sooty grey and heavily mottled and marked. At dusk, its haunting, resonant “wo-wo-wo-o-o-o” hoot, is reminiscent (as Salim Ali so evocatively put it) of a large ping-pong ball being dropped from a height and bouncing to silence. The dusky eagle-owl is resident from the north of the country to southern Maharashtra.

In the 1980s and 90s, another giant owl had become a personal favourite. It was the Eurasian eagle-owl (Bubo bubo), better known as the great horned owl. One resided in the renowned rocky “canyon” on the JNU campus in New Delhi. Our birdwatching group spotted the big tawny bird merging beautifully amongst the rocks thanks to white droppings spattered all over. The owl spread its great wings and flew with immense dignity along the canyon’s length, its lava eyes glinting in the sunlight. At home in rocky landscapes, ravines and wooded country, this eagle-owl is found all over the country.

The spot-bellied eagle-owl (Bubo nipalensis), aka forest eagle-owl (63 cm), is another mighty hunter in Himalayan forests and the Western Ghats. There’s also the large brown fish owl (Ketupa zeylonensis; 56 cm), which prefers wooded areas near water and enjoys fish and crabs in its diet. Its legs are unfeathered. It tends to have a slightly hunched posture, and its ear tufts don’t stick up vertically like other eagle-owls. 

The delightful collared scops owl (Otus bakkamoena) is smaller and slimmer than all of owls mentioned above. At Bharatpur, a well-known pair blessed us sleepily from outside their hollow when we paid our respects on every visit; they seemed undeterred by the hordes of pilgrims traipsing past to the nearby Keoladeo temple.

The world's most cosmopolitan owl has got to be the barn owl (Tyto alba), which at 36 cm is a medium-sized owl. That heart-faced, mushroom-and-gold owl with big inquiring eyes is a rat-catcher par excellence (a couple can capture around 3,000 rats in a season). These birds can give you the willies with their repertoire of blood-curdling shrieks, screams, and screeches. But they have, as I discovered, a wonderful romantic streak. Early on a foggy Republic Day morning in 2001, I accompanied a birder friend to Quidsia Gardens across the road from my house. A pair of barn owls had been nesting in a ravaged old gulmohur tree where they had recently had a family. We reached the tree just as the sun was lancing through the mist and peered up at its gnarled trunk. At the entrance to their home were the barn owls, facing the rising sun and smooching passionately. Just around the trunk, their three woolly babies stood almost one on top of the other, peering goggle-eyed at their parents. They could have had no better introduction to the “surya namaskar”. Sadly, the tree has since been hacked (for Metro construction), and the owls gone.

Probably the commonest owl in India is the ubiquitous, spotted owlet (Athene brama), a round-headed dumpy, grumpy little brown owl with lovely icing sugar spots on its head and plumage and golden-yellow eyes. At 21 cm it is one of the smaller owls in India. Resident in town, city, village and country, spotted owlets make their home in the hollows of trees, old, abandoned buildings and ruins. They seem to have a romantic streak — I’ve seen them necking on numerous occasions, and families sometimes line up tucked against each other outside their home in the early mornings, nuzzling one another. They hunt late in the evenings and at night, taking lizards, insects, and bats. They often perch on streetlights awaiting confused moths. 

Spotted owlets have a very enigmatic and the rare endemic cousin of the forest owlet (Athene blewetti). The two are very similar in appearance, but the forest owlet is not as spotted. It was actually declared extinct in 1838. A resident of Central India, it was last misreported from Gujarat in 1914, before being rediscovered in 1997 by ornithologist Pamela Rasmussen and her team at the foothills of the Satpura Range northeast of Mumbai. In 2018, the CITES Appendix 1 quoted its population as under 250 birds, placing it in the “Endangered” category. Loss of habitat and degradation of forests are the usual culprits.

Most owls are crepuscular (active at dusk and dawn) or nocturnal, not so much because they can’t bear dazzling sunlight than to get away from chivying crows, mynas, and babblers who give them no peace. The short-eared owl (Asio flammeus) is one of the exceptions, hunting by day. It is a winter migrant to India, often found flying low over fields seeking out rodents.

The collared pygmy owlet (Glaucidium brodiei) is our smallest owl a mere 15 cm in length and 60 gm in weight. The tiniest in the world, is the elf owl (Micrathen whitneyi), of the United States, and which nests in cacti, and weighs just 30 gm. Whether giants or elves this wonderful family has one common trait: a look-you-straight-in-the-eye, defiant never-say-die attitude and readiness to take on all comers, including intrusive humans and especially rats!