In the northern Andes of Peru, scientists have confirmed the existence of a new species of horned owl. The bird inhabits a narrow strip of high-altitude grasslands called jalca in the Huancabamba depression.
The species has been named Bubo jalca — the jalca owl. The description was published in July 2026 in the journal Audiornis. The authors are an international group of ornithologists led by Bernabé López-Lanús.
In appearance and size, the new owl is almost indistinguishable from Bubo nigrescens from the páramos of Ecuador and Colombia. The main difference lies in its voice. The owl emits a short, rapid call “he-ku!” with stress on the first syllable.
For comparison: the male Bubo nigrescens sings a prolonged three-syllable “kus-kun-go”, while Bubo magellanicus produces a two-syllable “tu-ku”. The differences are clearly visible in spectrograms and oscillograms.
The formal description is based on a female collected in July 1980 near Cruz Blanca, 33 kilometers southwest of Huancabamba, at an altitude of about 3050 meters. The specimen is housed in the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, and the voice recordings are in the Macaulay Library of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The jalca owl is extremely rare even within its range. To date, no photograph of a living bird is known. Its existence depends on the narrow jalca zone and adjacent cloud forests.
The threats are serious. The jalca grasslands are being actively taken over by pine plantations, and the neighboring cloud forests are under threat of logging. How long will this narrowly distributed species be preserved?
The discovery underscores how rich and vulnerable the fauna of the Peruvian Andes is. Even in well-studied regions, science continues to find new species whose future directly depends on the conservation of unique high-altitude ecosystems.
