An owl of woodland with large trees that hunts insects at night.
The head and back are dark brown, with white areas and lengthwise markings below. The eyes are yellow.
A Northern Boobook migrated between Japan and Southeast Asia across the ocean. In a 2026 study, GPS loggers were attached to males breeding in Japan’s Tohoku region, and one bird provided a complete annual track. It followed a clockwise loop between Japan and Southeast Asia, passing via Luzon in the Philippines, in line with earlier band-recovery records. The tracked owl crossed more than 1,400 km of ocean in both autumn and spring.
It left its breeding area on 17 October 2024. It spent summer in a primary fir forest in Miyagi Prefecture. During winter it used a four-year-old secondary forest in Kalimantan, Indonesia, surrounded by oil palm plantations.
IUCN Red List · Least Concern (LC) · Global species-level assessment
BirdLife International’s East Asian–Australasian Flyway species list gives the Northern Boobook the IUCN Least Concern (LC) category. The list consulted here does not provide an assessment year or population estimate. The 2026 GPS study records the annual route of one bird and describes a wintering landscape; it does not measure population size or trend across the species.