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 treated Australian and New Zealand boobooks, along with several taxa from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, as one species—"Ninox novaeseelandiae"—with 16 subspecies. In his 1968 book "Nightwatchmen of the Bush and Plain", Australian naturalist David Fleay observed that the boobooks from Tasmania more closely resembled those of New Zealand than those from mainland Australia, though he followed Mees in treating them as a single species. The southern boobook was split from the Tasmanian boobook and morepork in volume 5 of the "" in 1999, though several authors, including Australian ornithologists Les Christidis and Walter Boles, continued to treat the three