Animal Report

For the last few weeks our class has been working on an information report. We were not allowed to do mammals so I did the Barking Owl because I love owls. 

Here is my information report on Barking Owls.

A Barking Owl’s Scientific name is Ninox Connivens and lots of people call them the screaming woman bird. Barking Owls are not a threatened species because the number of them are increasing naturally. Did you know that the Barking Owl is a bird of prey and it’s kingdom is Animalia? That means that they can move spontaneously and independently at some point of their lives. They are wildly distributed throughout Australia but absent from central areas. The Barking Owls family is strigidae which means true owl. Its class is aves which means that it is a quite a small bird. Did you know that the Barking Owl is a carnivore so it's class is strigiformes? The subphylum of the Barking Owl is vertebrata and the phylum of a Barking Owl is chordata. The subphylum is an taxonomic category that ranks above class and the phylum is an taxonomic that ranks above class and below kingdom. Barking Owls are nocturnal and diurnal. They are an introduced species.

Did you know that the Barking Owl is an medium sized hawk owl and they have large, yellow eyes? They have very strong talons so that they can grip onto any sort of tree. Their talons and legs sometimes tuck into their body when they are flying fast. If you look at a picture of a Barking Owl you will see straight away that it has a hooked beak. Its hooked beak helps it digest its food properly. The adult Barking Owls have greyish-brown feathers on their back and on their head and wings. They also have little white spots on their wings. The young Barking Owls have a little less greyish brown streaking on the underparts. Did you know that they can grow up to 45 centimetres! Thats the height of a poisonous parasol mushroom, which is really quite small! The interesting thing about them is that they have two sets of eyelids! One set of the eyelids goes up and down and the other set of eyelids goes left to right.

Barking Owls are wildly distributed throughout Australia but they are absent from central areas. They usually like open woodlands because then there is more room to fly around. Barking Owls also like to live on the edges of forests but they often adjacent to farmland. The other place where you might find Barking Owls is the Savannah woodland.

Barking Owls feed on a variety of small to medium sized mammals. They eat birds, reptiles, insects, possums and rodents which is just about everything. Their prey is located in the air or on an exposed perch. Did you know that the most hunting is performed in the first few hours of the night and the last hours before dawn?

Barking Owls raise a single brood in a season. When the female incubates the eggs the male supplies the food. The nest site is usually in an open hollow in a tree with the trunk loosely lined with sticks and other wood debris. The young remain on their parents and they will remain in family group until the next breeding season. Did you know that when a female barking owl has an chick she screams a high pitched sound that calls the male barking owl? A breeding season for a barking owl is August to October so the chick stays in the family group for quite a long time. The incubation time is 28 days and the time in the nest for a chick is 48 days.

Barking Owls defend their territory fiercely from other Barking Owls. The young Barking Owls get shooed away from the nest by their parents when the new chick comes and they do this at night so then the young can’t see very well. Did you know that they fly in packs? One of their calls is a loud, wailing cry and the other one is a woof-woof call that sounds like a dog.

Barking Owls have two predators and one of them is humans for destroying their habitat. The other one is loss of habitat which means that they won’t have a nest.

I think that what we can do to help Barking Owls is not to destroy their habitat or they could possibly become extinct. Barking Owls need their space so if you live on or near a farm, try not to shoo them away. The other thing we need to do to increase the number of them is to be aware of lighting fires when you are in the forest or bush.

Bibliography 

http://birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/barking-owl

www.australiazoo.com.au

http://australianmuseum.net.au/

I hope that you learnt a thing or two from my report!