The long-whiskered owlet is a tiny owl that is endemic to a small area in the Andean mountains in Amazonas and San Martín in northern Peru. It is restricted to cloud forests with dense undergrowth and epiphytes at about 1,890–2,200 metres above sea level.
Similar species: Owls
By Thibaud Aronson
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Uploaded Apr 1, 2021. Captured Jan 20, 2021 19:01 in Fernando Belaunde Km 365.5, 01160, Peru.
comments (7)
I'd spent the previous 4 nights at Alto Nieva, the other spot where people go to look for it, and while we actually saw it on two of those nights, it was always perched directly above us and we never saw anything more than its butt.
But luck finally smiled at me on that night. We braved the rain with my guide and hiked for almost an hour down into a steep valley, and got to THE spot just before sunset. Soon enough we started hearing its froglike squawks nearby, which are notoriously hard to pin down. While I was looking high up at the canopy off the my left, my guide went to the right and within a minute he called out to me. He'd found it, just a few meters from us, only a couple meters off the ground, staring at us with its remarkable amber eyes!
I snapped a couple photos, fully aware that I was seeing something truly rare, and very, very grateful, and then we walked away, with the sound of the raindrops soon drowning out its calls.
Posted 4 years ago
Posted 4 years ago