Mottled Wood Owl

The mottled wood owl is a large owl of India and Nepal, easy to identify by its large size, its lack of ear tufts and the concentric barring on its face. It is mottled and vermiculated in reddish brown and white, with a facial disc finely barred in black and white concentric rings, an orange eyelid and a dark brown iris. The concentric face barring and mottled crown separate it from the brown wood owl in southern India. Several subspecies differ in wing length: one from southern India, one from Gujarat and one from northern India south of the Himalaya (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is found in gardens and thin deciduous forest adjacent to dry thorn forest or farmland, and is easily detected by its distinctive tremulous, eerie calls at dawn and dusk, a chuhua-aa with a quaver in the second note, given as an antiphonal duet by the male and female. Owls roost by day, usually in pairs, on a branch with dense foliage. The nest is a tree hollow with two or three white eggs, and most nests are found from February to April. SoIB 2023 treats it as a mainland India endemic and a resident of forest and plantation that eats vertebrates and carrion (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).