Park employee looks up at tree — and finds ‘rare’ visitor staring back. See it
A “routine” wildlife survey at a nature reserve in the United Arab Emirates took a turn when a staff member looked up at a tree — and found a “rare” visitor staring back. The brief encounter was the park’s first sighting of the “long-eared” species in 22 years.
An employee at the Al Wathba Wetland Reserve was conducting a “routine bird census” in January 2022 when they noticed an owl in a tree, ecologist Shakeel Ahmed said in a June 19 email to McClatchy News. The employee snapped a few photos before the bird “immediately flew away.”
Intrigued, the employee showed the photos to Ahmed and coworker Sálim Javed who identified the bird as a long-eared owl, Asio otus, a species rarely seen in the UAE, they wrote in a study published May 26 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Threatened Taxa.
Photos show the “rare” long-eared owl, which has pointy feathers on its head and bright yellow eyes. Its feathers are a mixture of brown hues, cream and black.
The owl was seen “roosting on a branch” after a day of “very high winds” and “heavy rains,” the study said.
The January 2022 owl sighting was the nature reserve’s first sighting of the species in 22 years and the country’s first sighting in nine years, researchers said.
Long-eared owls are a “highly migratory species with an extremely wide distribution range in Eurasia,” the study said. The species is not at-risk but does have a declining population.
Al Wathba Wetland Reserve is on the outskirts of Ahu Dhabi, the capital city of the UAE, a country on the Arabian Peninsula that borders Oman and Saudi Arabia.
The reserve is regularly monitored and “the most important site for migratory waterfowls, waders, diurnal birds of prey and owls” in the UAE, the study said.
This story was originally published June 20, 2025 at 9:43 AM with the headline "Park employee looks up at tree — and finds ‘rare’ visitor staring back. See it."
