A NEW GENUS AND SPECIES OF OWL (AVES: STRIGIDAE) FROM PERU

Abstract

A new genus and species of tiny owl of the family Strigidae is described from cloud forest in the Departamento de San Mart/n in northern Peru. It appears to be allied to Glaucidium and Micrathene, more closely to the latter than to the former, but generically clearly separable from both of these taxa.--Museum of Zoology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70893. Accepted 4 April 1977. Publication costs subsidized by a friend of the LSUMZ. In 1963 the Louisiana State University Museum of Zoology had the good fortune to acquire a new genus and species of tanager from Peru, Wetmorethraupis sterrhopte- ron (Lowery and O'Neill 1964). The description of this spectacular bird was received by the ornithological world with considerable interest because the consensus of or- nithologists at the time was that the world's birds were so well known that only a handful remained to be discovered. Since 1963 work in Peru alone by personnel of the Louisiana State University Museum of Zoology and by researchers at other institutions has turned up no fewer than 21 new species including four new genera (cf. Lowery and Tallman 1976). Peru is a physiographically and ecologically complex country and many parts of the eastern slopes of the Andes are still unexplored. Because of shifting Pleistocene climatic regimes and the instability and relative recentness of the Andes (Haffer 1974), the patterns of speciation in Peru, as well as in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia, are extremely complicated. We firmly believe that many pockets of unexplored terrain remain, especially along the eastern base of the Andes, that harbor birds still unknown to science. In this paper we describe another in the ever-lengthening series of remarkable discoveries.