New Britain boobook New Britain boobook The New Britain boobook ("Ninox odiosa"), also known as the spangled boobook, New Britain hawk-owl or Russet hawk-owl, is a small owl that is endemic to New Britain, the largest island in the Bismarck Archipelago in Papua New Guinea. The New Britain boobook is a small owl that grows to a length of about . It has finely spotted chocolate-brown plumage, golden eyes and white eyebrows. Its facial disk is brown while the upper breast is marked with a wide brown band with buff or white barrings. The underparts are densely spotted brown. Its call is a
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