Long-whiskered owlet
species of bird
The long-whiskered owlet (Xenoglaux loweryi) is a vulnerable species of owl in subfamily Surniinae of the "typical owls", family Strigidae. It is endemic to a small area in Amazonas and San Martín departments of northern Peru.
Taxonomy and systematics
The long-whiskered owlet was described in a 1977 paper from three specimens collected in August 1976. Though the species somewhat resembles several other small owls, the authors assigned it to a new genus, Xenoglaux, a combination of the Greek words xenos ("strange") and glaux ("owl"). They applied the specific epithet loweryi in recognition of George H. Lowery, Jr., for "his influence upon us and upon neotropical ornithology". A few more specimens were collected in succeeding years, and the bird was audio recorded after capture in a mist net in 2002. The first sighting in the wild was in 2007.
The original authors proposed that the long-whiskered owlet was most closely related to the owls of genus Glaucidium and somewhat more distantly to the North American elf owl (Micrathene whitneyi), "but generically clearly separable from both of these taxa". An extensive molecular phylogenetic study of the owls published in 2019 confirmed that the species' closest relatives are the elf owl and the collared owlet. At the time of that study the latter was named Glaucidium brodiei but the study also revealed that it did not belong in that genus.
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