Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin (ISSN 0178 – 6288) . Number 142, October 2016, pp. 1-13. | Page 2

2

It is a medium-sized owl, 30 to 33 centimeters long, and weighing 140 to 220
grams. It resembles the Hume’s Owl (Strix butleri) and the Tawny Owl (Strix
aluco) in plumage pattern and proportions (Prostak, 2015).
The species’ scientific name, Strix hadorami, honors Israeli ornithologist and
writer Hadoram Shirihai (Prostak, 2015).
“It is a special pleasure to name this bird for Hadoram Shirihai, a much-valued
colleague and collaborator for 20 years,” Dr. Schweizer and his colleagues Guy
M. Kirwan and José Luis Copete wrote in a paper entitled "Multiple lines of
evidence confirm that Hume's owl Strix butleri is two species, with description of
an unnamed species" which was published in the journal “Zootaxa” (Prostak,
2015).
“Although Hadoram’s ornithological interests are staggeringly wide-ranging, his
name is arguably particularly synonymous with this wonderful owl of wild
places in the Middle East. He discovered, when still a young boy, a live but
poisoned specimen (of the Desert Tawny Owl) in En Gedi, which became the first
individual to be held in captivity and is now a skeleton in the Tel Aviv
University Museum” (Prostak, 2015).
In 1878, Allan Octavian Hume, a colonial administrator in British India and an
avid ornithologist, was given an owl from Ormara, which is now part of Pakistan
(Russon, 2015).
This bird, a member of the earless owl genus Strix, was named Hume's owl (Strix
butleri) and today resides in the Natural History Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire.
Hume's owl is what is known as a "type specimen", and it was thought that the
other birds found in the Middle East came from the same breed (Russon, 2015).
"When we sequenced three specimens of the owl – one from Palestine, one from
Saudi Arabia and Hume's type specimen from the 1880s, we realised that Hume's
specimen was completely different from the Palestinian and Saudi Arabian birds
by almost 10%," Guy Kirwan, an associate researcher at the Field Museum of
Natural History in Chicago and the National Museum in Rio De Janeiro, who coauthored the paper, told the press (Russon, 2015).
Kirwan said that ornithologists were starting to suspect that there might be
different sub-types in the Hume's owl breed, and one big clue was a study
conducted by researchers from the Netherlands in 2012, where vocal recordings
were made of desert owls in Oman (Russon, 2015).
Unfortunately the researchers were not able to obtain a specimen in 2012, but
their vocal recordings showed that there was a clear difference between the bird
song and plumage of owls from Palestine and Saudi Arabia, and the bird song of
the Omani owls (Russon, 2015).

Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin – Number 142 – October 2016