New Owl Discovered! (Nov 2022 article)

Full article from Popular Science

Here’s a tl;dr of quotes from the article, but it’s short and well written, so you should give it a look. It talks about how it was discovered and sober facts about it and what they’re doing to try to keep it safe.

Meet the Príncipe Scops-Owl (Otus bikegila), a newly named species of owl found on Príncipe Island—a 53 square-mile island located off the western coast of Africa.

The team has proposed that the International Union for Conservation of Nature add the bird to its red list and classify it as ‘Critically Endangered,’ the highest threat level, due to the bird’s concentration in such a small area.

The birds occupy a small space roughly four times the size of New York’s Central Park, with a population of about 1,000 to 1,500 owls.

“The discovery of a new bird species is always an occasion to celebrate and an opportunity to reach out to the general public on the subject of biodiversity,” Melo writes in the team’s paper. “In this age of human-driven extinction, a major global effort should be undertaken to document what may soon not be anymore.”