26 June 2025
This morning once I opened Cornell Lab’s Birds of the World web site, the featured picture was a lesser horned owl (click on the hyperlink to see it). I’d by no means heard of a “lesser” for 2 causes. (1) It’s a comparatively information species break up from the nice horned owl a few decade in the past and (2) it lives partly South America the place I’ve by no means been — Peru to Tierra del Fuego.
Nice horned owls vary from the Arctic into South America with a lot regional variation that at the moment, even after the break up, there are 14 subspecies. The nominate subspecies, Bubo virginianus virginianus is the owl we’re accustomed to in Pittsburgh. The lesser horned owl was a subspecies Bubo virginianus magellanicus of the nice horned owl so he’s generally referred to as the Magellanic owl.
What’s the distinction between the 2? Weight! The heaviest lesser horned owls (1,335g) weigh about half that of the heaviest nice horned owls (2,500g).
Bolstering the proof that they should be break up, a crew of scientists led by Emily N. Ostrow performed a DNA examine of nice horned owl subspecies together with magellanicus and located that the subspecies’ DNA diverge in Peru.
Vary-wide phylogenomics of the Nice Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) reveals deep north-south divergence in northern Peru
— by Emily N. Ostrow?, Lucas H. DeCicco, Robert G. Moyle revealed in PeerJ
And that’s the place the lesser horned owl’s vary begins — in purple under.
Thankfully the 2 owls’ ranges don’t overlap so that you received’t have to do a DNA examine to know you’re a “lesser” in southern South America.
