Critically Endangered Forest Owlet Under Threat from Habitat Loss

Forest owlets are an endemic species to India. They are found only in small pockets of forest patches in India, and nowhere else in the world. The species were thought to be extinct, until a group of scientists rediscovered the species, and then started working on them. The forest owlets are threatened by severe habitat loss and development projects, apart from changes in climate. Sharada Balasubramanian writes about the birds, their rediscovery and how their habitat is threatened by ancient climate change and landscape modification.

- Sharada Balasubramanian

Forest owlets, a critically endangered bird, is found only in India, and nowhere else in the world. The bird was first spotted in the 1880s. After that, for almost 100 years, no one even discussed these birds.

The history of forest owlets dates back to 1872. It was the time when an Irish officer described forest owlets from Chhattisgarh in Eastern Madhya Pradesh. He thought the owl looked different. Until 1884, seven of these birds were collected from different Indian states. This was to create a distribution record of the forest owlets from a particular region or a time. After that, no one even heard about forest owlets.

In 1976, Ripley, a well-known ornithologist and author of prominent bird reference books, wrote a paper. In this paper, he listed the possibly extinct birds of India—those birds of which there were no records— and forest owlet was one among such birds. These birds looked similar to the commonly spotted owlet and were often mistaken for the same. But these species were different from the spotted owlet.

Two crucial research papers were published on forest owlets. One is understanding the bird’s diversity through genetic research, and the other one is how the ancient climatic change impacted the distribution of these birds. This was for the first time that genetic research was done on the forest owlets.

Rediscovery of the Species