Ashy-faced owl
species of bird
The ashy-faced owl (Tyto glaucops) is a species of bird in the barn-owl family Tytonidae. It is found on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, on Dominica, and on several other islands of the Lesser Antilles.
Taxonomy and systematics
The ashy-faced owl was formally described in 1852 by the German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup and given the binomial name Strix glaucops. The specific epithet is from Ancient Greek glaukos meaning "blue-grey" or "glaucous". Kaup specified the type locality as Jamaica. This was an error and has been corrected to Hispaniola. The ashy-faced owl is now placed in the genus Tyto that was introduced in 1828 by Gustaf Johan Billberg.
The taxonomy of the ashy-faced owl is unsettled. At one time it was considered conspecific with the barn owl sensu lato (Tyto alba). After the separation the International Ornithological Committee (IOC) long treated it as monotypic and endemic to Hispaniola, but in July 2023 moved two subspecies from the American barn owl (Tyto furcata) into it.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ashy-faced 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.