Buffy fish owl
species of bird
The buffy fish owl (Ketupa ketupu), also known as the Malay fish owl, is a fish owl in the family Strigidae. It is native to Southeast Asia and lives foremost in tropical forests and wetlands. Due to its wide distribution and assumed stable population, it is listed as least concern on the IUCN Red List since 2004.
Taxonomy
Strix ketupu was the scientific name proposed by Thomas Horsfield in 1821 for a buffy fish owl collected in Java.
Ketupa was proposed as generic name by René-Primevère Lesson in 1831 for fish owl species from Java and India. In the 19th and 20th centuries, several zoological specimens of buffy fish owls were described:
Ketupa minor by Johann Büttikofer in 1896 were two small fish owls collected on Nias island with a wing chord of 29.5–30 cm (11.6–11.8 in), a tail of 14–14.5 cm (5.5–5.7 in), and a short bill of 3.5 cm (1.4 in).
Bubo ketupu aagaardi by Oscar Neumann in 1935 was a pale fish owl specimen from Bangnara in Thailand with a wing chord of 31.5–34.5 cm (12.4–13.6 in).
Bubo ketupu pageli also by Neumann in 1935 was a reddish fish owl from the mountains of northeastern Borneo with a wing chord of 31–33 cm (12–13 in).
Three are recognised today as Ketupa ketupu subspecies:
K. k. ketupu (Horsfield, 1821) - West Bengal, Assam, southern Thailand and Vietnam, the Malay Peninsula to Riau Archipelago, Sumatra, Belitung, Java, Bali and much of Borneo
K. k.
“Buffy fish owl” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Buffy, fish and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Buffy fish owl” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Buffy, fish and species provides the most credible route into that argument.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q904024. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 1821, 1831 and 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Buffy fish owl” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.