The Rufous Fishing Owl, Chouette D'Ussher, Chouette-pêcheuse Rousse, Búho Pescador Rojizo, or Cárabo Pescador Rojizo (Scotopelia ussheri) is a species of owl in the Strigidae family. It is found in Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests and subtropical or tropical mangrove forests. It is threatened by habitat loss. It was formerly classified as Endangered by the IUCN. But new research show that is not as rare as it was believed. Consequently, it was downlisted to Vulnerable on the 2011 Red List Of Threatened Species.
English naturalist Richard Bowdler Sharpe described the Rufous Fishing Owl in 1871. It is one of three species in the genus Scotopelia.
It measures 46 to 51 cm in length, and has bare legs and feet.
Famous quotes containing the words fishing and/or owl:
“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“After sitting in my chamber many days, reading the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by literature.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)