Southern boobook north of Perth. There, southern boobook owls are dying after eating rodents that people have killed with second-generation anticoagulant rat poison. Older poisons such as warfarin or coumatetralyl were unlikely to affect owls. Southern boobook The southern boobook ("Ninox boobook") is a species of owl native to mainland Australia, southern New Guinea, the island of Timor, and the Sunda Islands. Described by John Latham in 1801, it was generally considered to be the same species as the morepork of New Zealand until 1999. Its name is derived from its two-tone "boo-book" call. Eleven subspecies of the southern boobook are recognized,
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