Barn owls around the world

DavidBrown

DavidBrown

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
I was just looking at a picture of the barn owl that Hix took in Uganda (http://www.zoochat.com/1683/barn-owl-335480/) and it occurs to me that most of us here likely have this species literally in our back yards or otherwise nearby.

Has anybody seen barn owls on more than one continent? I'm curious who has the most barn owl sightings from around the world. I have only seen them in California, but I wasn't looking for them in Africa - obviously they were around.

Does anyone know of any zoos that have barn owls from more than one part of the world?

Strangely I cannot find any evidence that anyone has looked at genetic differentiation of this species across continents. It seems like a perfect system in which to study genetic and ecological differentiation.
 
I have seen barn owls in the UK and Ghana. There are some differences in the plumage colour, particularly on the breast, but I can't say that they are at all obvious in the field. One difference is that barn owls are often active at twilight in the UK, and in daylight in winter, but in the tropics twilight is brief and day length is almost constant, so I only saw them at night.
I agree that it is rather odd that such a relatively sedentary species should have such a wide distribution. The short-eared owl is another widely distributed owl.

Alan
 
This isn't unique just to barn owls. Peregrine Falcon and Osprey, for example, also have cosmopolitan ranges.
 
I always am skeptical when I see a species with a natural world-wide range. If I missed someone answering this, sorry, but has any work been done to see if many Barn Owl subspecies are actual species? I believe some have.

~Thylo:cool:
 
ThylacineAlive said:
I always am skeptical when I see a species with a natural world-wide range. If I missed someone answering this, sorry, but has any work been done to see if many Barn Owl subspecies are actual species? I believe some have.

~Thylo:cool:
Click to expand...

It doesn't appear that such a study has been published in the scientific literature. Maybe you will be the person to do it, Mr. Future Zoologist.
 
when I used to go to Ibiza in the early 1990's we used to rent a house in the centre of the old town of Ibiza and I would watch an owl every morning from the roof terrace, it sat on a TV ariel about 20 yards away, it also appeared at night swooping over the rooftops and along the roof terrace wall. I often see one here on my way home at dusk in the wintertime, especially on misty or drizzly evenings.
 
I found this link which says nine species of barn owl are proposed. I was unable to find any furthur iinformation.

Barn Owl taxonomic split - Democratic Underground

In the 1970s Chester exhibited European white-breasted barn owl (Tyto alba alba) and African barn owl (Tyto alba affinis) and bred some hybrid young from the pair.

The female barn owl was eventually sent to someone who wanted to beed the subspecies and Chester then began a project to breed white-breasted barn owls for release into the wild.
 
gerenuk said:
This isn't unique just to barn owls. Peregrine Falcon and Osprey, for example, also have cosmopolitan ranges.
Click to expand...

Absolutely true: but peregrines peregrinate, of course, and ospreys and short-eared owls are migratory, in some regions at least. As far as I know barn owls do not.

Alan
 
there are loads of Tyto species (both extant and extinct), I don't have time to check the number but it's quite a lot, mostly from the southeast Asia area. The regular barn owl Tyot alba has always been one of those "worldwide" species along with osprey and peregrine but recently (in the past several years) alba has been split into multiple species. The taxonomic trend today of course is splitting (and birders tend to split everything possible to inflate their life lists) but I don't know specifics on the genetic reasons. However there are quite obvious visual and behavioural differences between, say, European and Australian barn owls. And it does seem likely that at least some of the island taxa included in alba are actually endemic island species rather than subspecies.

For myself, I'm quite conservative over most splits so I still include alba as one worldwide species.

Interestingly enough, NZ doesn't have ospreys, peregrines or barn owls. There are no records at all of the first two, and of barn owls there are just a handful of recorded vagrants of which some were most likely aeroplane-assisted. There is currently one breeding pair in the far north of NZ (which is quite remarkable given the low number of vagrants that make it here) but they have never successfully raised any chicks in about a decade (?).
 
As well as the one in Uganda I also saw a barn owl for a split second on Niue a couple of years ago.

:p

Hix
 
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