This went on for years. Approximate breeding and winter distribution of Eurasian Scops Owl Otus scops (pink and purple) and Pallid Scops Owl O brucei (orange and brown ) and breeding distribution of Cyprus Scops Owl O cyprius yellow (Cyprus only) and Arabian Scops Owl O pamelae green . Adult announces arrival with twiu-like calls, then croaks as a feeding call. Same as in CD2-22. Another male is hooting some distance away (if you are listening on headphones, he should be on the right). CD2-49: Arabian Scops Owl Otus pamelae Wadi Darbat, Dhofar, Oman, 22:03, 16 April 2010. Arabian Scops Owl branched off earliest, followed by Eurasian Scops Owl and two island species from either side of Africa, leaving African Scops as the most recently evolved species. The striking thing about these begging calls is the very fast rate of their delivery, up to around 70/minute. König (1973) found that she could play back recordings in perfect synchrony with their performer, even when the recordings were several years old. Subjects of particular interest include ageing and sexing birds by their sounds, and recognising hidden biodiversity, ‘new species’, through bird sounds. Hooting of female and male, followed by twiu soliciting calls of female. Cicadas sound background. CD2-21: Eurasian Scops Owl Otus scops Rosmaninhal, Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, 00:01, 13 May 2012. CD1-12: Eurasian Scops Owl Otus scops Vale da Ribeira das Mercês, São Bras de Alportel, Portugal, 19:31, 19 March 2009. Background: Iberian Green Frog Pelophylax perezi, Common Nightingale Luscinia megarhynchos. The fact that the year before, and for every year in living memory, this sound had been assigned to corvids seemed to make little difference. 07.017.AB.05212.31. Playback experiments have shown that males are able to vary the pitch of their hoots and ‘lie’ about their fitness. At 1:09 the copulation twitter is overlaid on one of the female’s twiu calls, and my sexing is confirmed. Learn about Sula Scops-Owl: explore photos, sounds, and observations collected by birders around the world. Enefco House This can lead to overestimates of the number of males present in a given area. 090319.MR.193136.11. One call of Eurasian Scops Owl actually sounds very similar to a Little Owl, so much so that it forms an identification pitfall. Vagrants of either species need to be identified with care. The nearest one has an intermittent and very faint second note or bip. CD2-52: Arabian Scops Owl Otus pamelae Wadi Darbat, Dhofar, Oman, 19:20, 26 February 2014. In summer they can count on a steady food supply, not fluctuating from year to year. Three other owl species are quiet, including two – Eurasian Eagle-Owl Bubo bubo and Tawny Owl Strix aluco – that are sworn enemies of Scops (Mikkola 1983). Its hoots were slightly higher-pitched than the one in CD2-50, and delivered at slightly shorter intervals of 7.9 seconds. African Scops Owl (Otus senegalensis) bird call sounds on dibird.com. It can be difficult to avoid being hypnotised and keep track of what is going on. Perhaps somebody else would like to take up the challenge. Night Sounds (scops owl). Freesound - "Scops Owl.wav" by soundskeep Free for commercial use. Every evening, despite the wind, up to seven Common Nightingales would begin singing in the poplar belt at the edge of the village where I was staying. 130718.MR.225614.01, CD2-15: Iberian Midwife Toad Alytes cisternasii Rosmaninhal, Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal, 21:25, 24 September 2009. It is a pleasant place to be, especially during the coolness of the night. Its plumage is also much paler with less prominent streaks on the breast and a less distinct scapular stripe. We would love to have recorded a larger repertoire but events elsewhere in Arabia, described in the final chapter, stole our attention during the final year of fieldwork for this book. Sound therapy. Scops owls time their breeding to coincide with the maximum abundance of large insects, and adults may be feeding fledglings long after most other owls have finished. I placed the microphones close to the nest and left, recovering them in the morning. Same male as in CD2-50 & 56. A few days after my visit the nest was predated, and the juveniles’ delicate body feathers were scattered on leaf litter under the tree. In the mountainous Asir region of Saudi Arabia it lives on dry wooded slopes, in lush vegetation and Ficus thickets, as well as montane juniper forest. Then from 0:28 the female drops to a slightly lower pitch and utters a series of twiu notes that have an audibly different shape. We still know very little about the half of their life spent outside Europe, and I wonder what some well-designed tracking experiments might reveal. Then from the 60th day, the gestures decrease. Song of a distant male. Most individuals do not bip at all and amazingly, a 26-page study of individual variation in hooting (Dragonetti 2007) fails to mention it at all. April, May and June have an almost equal share of the total. Its calls seemed too loud and were repeated with gaps too long to be juvenile Scops. Hooting. In southern Oman and much of Yemen, it occurs in Common Myrrh Commiphora myrrha and ‘acacia’ scrub. Egg‑laying is from mid-May to mid-June. Now and then a distant dog barks or a feral pig squeals. Background: Sicilian Partridge Alectoris whitakeri, Cucumiau Athene noctua and other Eurasian Scops Owls. Background: rutting Red Deer Cervus elaphus and fish in the Tagus river. After climbing to inspect a few holes, which I can discount due to the presence of spider webs, I usually end up playing ‘spot the cicada’. The weather outside had become surprisingly benign – the temperature was such than a coat wasn’t required (the only time that weekend), the rain had stopped, and the wind was all-but-gone. A diet of large insects precludes them from breeding in northern Europe. During northward migration, Eurasian Scops Owls can be surprisingly vocal. In Cyprus Scops Owl O cyprius, bips are the rule and very audible. For as long as anyone can remember, the local name for scops owl has been “little crow”. Background: crickets and Southern Tree Frog Hyla meridionalis. Dimensions such as wing length are irrelevant; it is weight that counts. The sequence ends with copulation, accompanied by a shrill twitter from the male and a croaking, lower-pitched dr-r-r-r from the female. The sound they were making? Three of the four males converge around the same pitch, a slightly sharp E for a musician or 1333 Hz for a scientist. Two nestlings beg and give occasional high-pitched chitters. Sometimes an individual gives just an occasional bip. File Details. Roosts by day in trees, normally close to the trunk, or in dense foliage, cavities in mature trees or rocks, holes in walls and similar places. MR.192015.01, CD2-54: Arabian Scops Owl Otus pamelae Wadi Darbat, Dhofar, Oman, 19:20, 26 February 2014. In sonagrams, this corresponds to a rapid initial descent in Scops; the notes appear L-shaped. Eurasian Scops Owl (Otus scops). The majority of callers have been reported from September to November, with some from December to February and April, suggesting that most breeding takes place there after the Southwest Monsoon and may continue until April (Jennings 2010). Of the taxa usually included in Eurasian Scops, only cyprius, a resident of Cyprus, sounds markedly different, which is why we regard it as a separate species. Its hooting does actually sound very similar to that of African Scops Owl. During the night, the parents fed the young frequently, often several times per hour. Immediately after male’s copulation twitter, female gives croaking call. CD2-18: Eurasian Scops Owl Otus scops Northern slopes of Mt Etna, Castiglione, Catania, Sicily, 05:13, 22 April 2007. Often two Scops apparently hooting together are simply two males on different pitches. Winter survival is more difficult. Read more about the Common Nightingales here. Fortunately the climax occurred only after I had stopped the motor (CD2-21). We did not manage to record any juvenile sounds, for instance. I include it here to draw attention to the croaking call (König 1973), which sounds like an amphibian, perhaps a Common Frog Rana temporaria or a Natterjack Toad Bufo calamita. Eurasian Scops Owls breed in a band of suitable habitats from Morocco and Iberia across southern Europe, skirting the Black Sea and the Central Asian steppes all the way to Lake Baikal in eastern Russia. Occasionally, some notes may be heard from the roost during … It is also present in the recording from Kazakhstan (cf, CD2-16), where it is much harder to hear. The Sound Approach aim to popularise birdsong and raise standards in the use of sounds in bird identification. Sexing them is often far from straightforward, and may not always be possible. Paired with the male photographed on the same day. The way they alternate is by ‘eventual variation’, ie, AAABBB rather than ‘immediate variation’ or ABABAB. Hooting of a male at close range. CD2-19 was recorded earlier in the night. I knew that the excitement calls were coming from an adult Scops, but I could also hear a juvenile owl in the same valley. Some locals had given an adult and three fledglings to Harry St John Philby, an Arabist, explorer and writer known to them as ‘Sheikh Abdullah’. On another occasion, I ruined a recording of the lead-up to copulation by returning in my car at just the wrong moment. Background: Iberian Green Frog Pelophenax perezi. Older distribution maps (eg, in Mikkola 1983) show the species breeding further north than it does today, especially in France and Russia, so overshooting was probably commoner back then. They are not even each other’s closest relatives (Pons et al 2013). 19 The Quay Sadly, I never had the chance to follow the development of these young. When these characteristics are combined with a much higher overall pitch and they are perched close to a typical-sounding male, we can identify them with confidence (CD2-17). From then on, they rock their body when begging. After the courtship period, however, females hoot very little. After a few seconds it goes to the nest, and the young start begging intensely with an almost puppy-like panting. By night they tantalise me with their obvious presence; by day they vanish into thin air. In CD2-22, one of the adults announces its arrival with two twiu-like calls. At Rosmaninhal in Portugal, I searched for nests in early June on an evening when the males were frustratingly quiet. It is unrecorded whether St John Philby told George Bates about any sounds he may have heard from Arabian Scops Owl. I never did find this male’s nest, and when I eventually found his neighbours’ nest it was through more patient fieldcraft. The male gives a high-pitched twitter while the female gives a few very short notes that may be related to the croaking call of Eurasian Scops (CD2-54). At one point my impatience got the better of me and I tried a little playback. Pitch matters to male Eurasian Scops Owls. 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