Norfolk boobook mated with the female with the pair producing fledged chicks in 1989 and 1990. The original female disappeared in 1996 but, by then, there was a small hybrid population of about a dozen birds. These birds and their descendants continue to exist on the island. Norfolk boobook The Norfolk boobook ("Ninox novaeseelandiae undulata"), also known as the Norfolk Island boobook, Norfolk Island owl or Norfolk Island morepork, was a bird in the true owl family endemic to Norfolk Island, an Australian territory in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. It is an extinct subspecies of the morepork ("Ninox
Southern boobook boobook" in 1801, writing about it in English, before giving it its scientific name, taking its species epithet from a local Dharug word for the bird. The species description was based on a painting by Thomas Watling of a bird—the holotype—in the Sydney district in the 1790s. John Gould described "Athene marmorata" in 1846 from a specimen in South Australia; this is regarded as a synonym. German naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup classified the two taxa into subgenus "Spiloglaux" of a new genus "Ieraglaux" in 1852, renaming "S. boobook" to "Ieraglaux (Spiloglaux) bubuk". In his 1865 "Handbook to the Birds of