A horned owl living in a narrow strip of high-Andean grassland in northern Peru is a species new to science, according to a paper published in July 2026 in the journal Audiornis.
The Jalca horned owl (Bubo jalca). Image credit: López-Lanús et al.
The newly described owl species belongs to the genus Bubo, a group that includes over 10 species of American horned owls and Old World eagle-owls.
Named Bubo jalca (common name is the Jalca horned owl), the bird inhabits the jalca, a cold, high-elevation grassland and cloud-forest habitat restricted to the Huancabamba Depression, a geographic dip in the Peruvian Andes that separates the páramo ecosystem to the north from the puna to the south.
“Bubo jalca is a particularly rare taxon, or at least a very scarce one, within its area of occurrence: the jalca and the adjacent cloud forest,” said Universidad Nacional de Piura ornithologist Armando Ugaz Cherre and his colleagues Argentina and Peru.
“To date, no photographs of the species are known, an indirect reflection of its singularity.”
In plumage and body measurements, Bubo jalca is essentially indistinguishable from its closest relative, Bubo nigrescens, which lives in the páramo habitat in Ecuador and Colombia.
What sets the new species apart, according to the researchers, is its call.
“Its call is distinguishable both aurally and by phrase structure on spectrograms and oscillograms and is therefore diagnostic,” they said.
“It utters a rapid ‘jé-cu!’ with emphasis on the first syllable, rather than the prolonged trisyllabic ‘cus-cún-go’ of the male Bubo nigrescens (with stress on the middle syllable), or the rapid bisyllabic ‘tu-cú’ of both sexes of Bubo magellanicus.”
The formal description of Bubo jalca is based on a female specimen collected in July 1980 near Cruz Blanca, about 33 km by road southwest of Huancabamba, at roughly 3,050 m elevation.
The specimen is held at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, and matching sound recordings of the same individual are archived at the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The authors describe Bubo jalca as facing serious conservation concerns because of its narrow range.
They point to the expansion of pine plantations into jalca grassland and to deforestation of adjacent cloud forest.
“Bubo jalca is considered to face serious conservation threats as an extremely range-restricted species, whose persistence depends not only upon the jalca (recently undergoing an accelerating invasion by pine plantations), but also upon the adjoining cloud forest, itself under imminent threat of deforestation,” they concluded.
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Bernabé López-Lanús et al. 2026. Confirmation of a new owl species (Strigidae: Bubo) endemic to the jalca of the Huancabamba Andean Depression, Peru. Audiornis 6: 2-53
