no pictures?

Chris

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 8:43 AM, Michael Hobbs <birdmarymoor at verizon.net>wrote:

> From www.ScienceToday.net:
>>
>
> Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have discovered a new species of
> owl that was, until now, believed only to be a hoax.
>
> The newly described Ollie's Sea Owl (Surnia hunderii) may actually have the
> most complex life history of any owl species, according to Nula Moresova, a
> research ornithologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural
> History. "The more we found out about this species, the more astounded we
> became. This bird has, not just one, but several truly unique aspects to
> its
> behavior."
>
> In 1916, a Norwegian fisherman, Olaf Kvifte, brought a specimen of a white
> owl to Lars Hunderi, a scientist at the Norwegian Department of Fisheries.
> Kvifte claimed to have found the owl on an ice floe in a fjord in
> far-northern Norway. When Hunderi presented a paper on the specimen to the
> Scandinavian Ornithological Institution in 1917, however, he was met with
> scorn and derision. It was believed that the white owl was simply an
> albino
> Northern Hawk Owl, an owl of the boreal region, and that Kvifte's claims
> that it had been found on an ice floe were clearly a fabrication. Both
> Kvifte and Hunderi died in the 1918 flu epidemic shortly after the
> presentation of the paper. The specimen was discarded, and the incident
> mostly forgotten.
>
> However, in 2003, during a field expedition to a remote region in the far
> north of Norway, Moresova observed a white owl attacking seabirds nesting
> on
> cliffs. She was able to collect that specimen, and subsequent genetic
> tests
> showed that while it was related to the Northern Hawk Owl (Surnia ulula),
> it
> was definitely not of that species. "From the lab work, we knew we had
> found something new, but it took us a while to figure out just what," said
> Creido Fanfarron, who led the Smithsonian Institution's research project.
>
> A 2004 expedition revealed more details about this owl. Measuring almost
> 50
> centimeters long, with a wingspan of nearly a meter, and weighing about 400
> grams, Ollie's Sea Owl is noticeably larger than the Northern Hawk Owl.
> The
> birds seen in Norway were pure white all over, complete with white
> feathering hiding the legs and feet. "On the ice, this guy's pretty much
> invisible," stated Fanfarron. "We had to use infrared cameras to find
> roosting owls, since they blended in with the ice so completely." And just
> as Olaf Kvifte had observed in 1916, the owls were nesting exclusively on
> ice floes in northern Norwegian fjords.
>
> Most amazing were the feeding techniques that scientists observed. Ollie's
> Sea Owls were seen making daring flights at cliff-nesting birds such as
> murres and kittiwakes. The startled adults would occasionally dislodge
> eggs
> from the cliffs where they nested, and the sea owls would grab the eggs out
> of mid-air before they hit the water. "In all of our observations during
> June and early July, the sea owls seemed to eat only eggs snagged out of
> the
> air. It was truly amazing to see them catch eggs without crushing them."
>
> In late-July, at about the time that sea owl eggs were hatching, the murre
> and kittiwake eggs were also hatching. The Ollie's Sea Owls no longer had
> falling eggs to catch, and had to change their feeding strategy. Using
> their incredible speed, they would harass seabirds who were bringing fish
> back to their babies. After high speed pursuits that would often last for
> minutes, the seabirds would often drop their prey in order to escape the
> owls. The owls would then catch the small fish in mid-air. "They were
> very
> adept at catching the sardine-sized prey, sometimes two or three fish in
> each talon," reported Moresova.
>
> And in August, when murre chicks were grown, the sea owls found yet another
> way to gather food. When a murre chick is ready to leave the nest, its
> father will land on the ocean waters below the cliff and call to his single
> baby, urging it to jump. The still-flightless chick will then fall, often
> 40
> meters or more, to join it's father in the sea. Or that's what is supposed
> to happen. Repeatedly, however, Fanfarron and his team witnessed sea owls
> grabbing the baby murres in mid-leap.
>
> The scientists delayed publication of the discovery of Ollie's Sea Owl
> because they wanted to know how the owls survived the other nine months of
> the year when there weren't seabirds around to terrorize. So in August,
> 2005, Fanfarron's team put radio transmitters on four owls, two adults and
> two juveniles, and then tracked their movements. They were puzzled to find
> that, once the sea owl babies had fledged, the owls dispersed from their
> nesting floes and began extensive flights around grass-covered islands and
> along the tops of cliffs. "For the longest time, we couldn't figure out
> what they were doing. They'd fly for miles, never stopping to eat."
>
> Then, in a scene stranger than anything scientists could ever have
> imagined,
> the owls were observed eating yet another airborne prey. On August 29,
> 2005, Fanfarron and Moresova, tracking two sea owls in an ultralight
> aircraft, observed the owls frantically grabbing small critters falling off
> a cliff. "It took us a while to figure out what we were seeing. The owls
> were grabbing lemmings that were jumping off the cliffs!" Lemmings, small
> rodents, are know to disperse when overpopulated by leaping from cliffs and
> swimming to new habitats. The owls were not even landing to eat, but were
> gorging themselves in-flight on the heads of the lemmings, discarding the
> bodies. In 45 minutes, each owl consumed the heads of more than 25
> lemmings.
>
> In yet another stunning development, the day after stuffing themselves with
> lemmings, the owls set off flying south-southwest across the open ocean.
> After about twenty days and nights of non-stop flight, the owls arrived at
> the Sargasso Sea, an oceanic gyre or whirlpool within the Bermuda Triangle,
> a distance of nearly 6500 kilometers. Further study is needed. "We think
> they might be catching and eating storm-petrels during their migration to
> sustain them during the long flight," Fanfarron speculated.
>
> When Fanfarron and his team caught up with the owls, they were surprised to
> find them entirely changed. No longer pure white, the owls had apparently
> molted during or immediately after their transoceanic flight, replacing
> their white feathers with a new coat of drab slate-gray and brown feathers.
> Furthermore, the owls, which had bred in the never-ending sunlight of the
> arctic summer, were completely nocturnal in their new home.
>
> By day, they would roost on floating debris caught in the gyre. It took
> Fanfarron's team another couple of years of study to discover how the sea
> owls foraged in the near-tropical oceanic waters of the Sargasso.
> Eventually
> they were able to show that the sea owls survived by catching leaping
> flying
> fish. Phosphorescence on the fish allows the owls to see their prey. "At
> night, the flying fish would look like glowing darts popping out of the
> water. The owls would use their excellent vision and rapid flight to catch
> the fish in mid-air," noted Moresova.
>
> Ollie's Sea Owl is unique in many respects. "This is the only owl that
> hunts at sea, the only one that eats so many different kinds of prey - bird
> eggs, birds, mammals, and fish - on a regular basis, and to catch all of
> them in the air, and the only owl to undergo a complete color change
> seasonally," explained Moresova. The team is uncertain of the population
> size of this owl, but their initial estimates are as low as 100-200
> breeding
> pairs. That would make Ollie's Sea Owl one of the rarest owls in the world
> as well.
>
> Fanfarron became aware of the early twentieth century claims of a hoax
> regarding a white ice-nesting owl. Exhaustive research failed to turn up a
> single copy of Lars Hunderi's 1917 paper. However, they were able to find
> many letters and notes related to the supposed hoax. Despite the absence
> of
> both the original paper and the original specimen, Fanfarron is confident
> that Hunderi deserves the credit for originally describing this owl:
> "Without the paper, we have no way to discover what Lars had named his owl.
> So that task fell to us, and we decided to honor Hunderi in the scientific
> name of this new species. We also wanted to honor Olaf Kvifte, the
> original
> discoverer of the bird, and thus we gave the species the common name of
> Ollie's Sea Owl. We thought of naming it Kvifte's Sea Owl, but none of us
> could pronounce his last name."
>
> These findings will be published in the international science journal
> Avitaxa, on April 1, 2009.
>
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