The barking owl (Ninox connivens), also known as the winking owl, is a nocturnal bird species native to mainland Australia and parts of New Guinea and the Moluccas. They are a medium-sized brown owl and have a characteristic voice with calls ranging from a barking dog noise to an intense human-like howl.
Etymology
The owl takes its name from its characteristic barking voice. For a short period before 2016, the Red List of Threatened Species referred to this species as the "barking boobook". However, this is not used as a common name in Australia or other English speaking areas in this species' range and has now been corrected to barking owl. The Yanyuwa name for the owl is mulurrku.
Taxonomy
The barking owl was first described by the English ornithologist John Latham in 1801 with the binomial name Falco connivens. Latham commented that the species "Inhabits New Holland, but no history annexed, further than that it has a wonderful faculty of contracting and dilating the iris: and that the native name is Goora-a-Gang." The specific epithet is the Latin connivens 'winking'.
There are five subspecies: N. c. rufostrigata (Gray, GR, 1861) - north Maluku Islands N. b. remigialis Stresemann, 1930 - Kai Islands. Stresemann described it in 1930 from a specimen collected in 1909. Poorly known, it has been recorded twice more in 1998 and 2010. N. c. assimilis Salvadori & D'Albertis, 1875 - east New Guinea, Manam, Karkar and Daru Islands N. c. peninsularis Salvadori, 1876 - north Australia N. c. connivens (Latham, 1801) - southwest, east and southeast Australia N. b. remigialis was formerly considered a subspecies of the Australian boobook (N. boobook) but was transferred to N. connivens by the International Ornithological Congress in 2022.
Description
The barking owl is coloured brown with white spots on its wings and a vertically streaked chest. They have large eyes that have a yellow iris, a discrete facial mask and yellow skin on the feet. Their underparts are brownish-grey and coarsely spotted white with their tail and flight feathers being strongly banded brown and white. They are a robust, medium-sized owl long and their wingspan is between . They weigh between [p20]. Size varies only slightly between the male and female birds with the male barking owl being 8-10 % heavier. They are one of only a handful of owl species exhibiting normal sexual dimorphism. In a banding study conducted in the Pilliga forests of northern New South Wales, males averaged with females averaging [p20]. In Australia, the smallest barking owls are found on Cape York Peninsula and the largest in southern Australia.
Distribution and Habitat
The barking owl lives in mainland Australia along the eastern and northern coast of the continent and the southwest areas surrounding Perth, Western Australia. Inland they occupy areas near lakes and waterways or other wooded environments. They also live in drier parts of New Guinea and the Moluccas (Halmahera, Morotai, Bacan and Obi). Once widespread, barking owls are now less common in southern mainland Australia.
They choose to live in forests or woodland areas that have large trees for nesting and foliage cover for roosting. They often reside near river, swamp or creek beds as these features often have large trees with hollows required for nesting and the productivity to support sufficient prey. The only detailed studies of barking owl home-ranges have been conducted in southern Australia where the species is declining. In northern Victoria, barking owl pairs were found to average a home-range of with little overlap between pairs. Foraging was concentrated within forested areas of each home range. These results are mirrored in the Pilliga forests of northern NSW although there the home ranges were larger, often up to .
Although barking owls are uncommon and sometimes even rare in many suburban areas, they occasionally do get accustomed to humans and even start to nest in streets or near farm-houses.
Behaviour
Diet
The barking owl has one of the broadest diets of any Australian owl. Barking owls hunt in timbered and open habitats but usually rely on trees as hunting perches. Their diet includes prey taken from the ground, the trees, the surface of waterbodies, and directly from the air. In some locations mammals make up the majority of prey biomass with prey sizes from mice and small carnivorous marsupials up to rabbits and brushtail possums around a kilogram or more in weight. Sugar gliders are a frequent prey item. Bats of all sizes are also commonly taken.