Morepork they emulate the bird's distinctive two-pitched call. It has dark brown plumage with prominent pale spots, and golden-yellow eyes. It is generally nocturnal, though is sometimes active at dawn and dusk, retiring to roost in secluded spots in the foliage of trees. The morepork feeds on insects and small vertebrates, hunting by pouncing on them from tree perches. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed the morepork as being of least concern on account of its large range and apparently stable population. English naturalist John Latham wrote of the New Zealand owl in his 1780s work "A General
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