Animal of the Week March 15, 2013 -- Twit-whoooo's laughing now

Bad news for this week's animal. At a Bangkok meeting, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) struck several extinct species of the antipodes off its register. So, the crescent nail-tail wallaby (an animal whose bones passed through my calipers during my MSc; extinct 1956) and the Tasmanian tiger (1936) are no longer on their watch-list, and neither is Sceloglaux albifacies (laughing owl; 1914).

The laughing owl was one of two species of owl native to New Zealand, but unlike the morepork, the soft 'ruru' call of which still echoes across the country's green spaces, the laughing owl, like so many other of New Zealand's birds succumbed to the introduction of alien species with the arrival of man.

Unlike Haast's Eagle these owls were not a victim of Polynesian colonisation, they perhaps even experienced a boon following the introduction of the Polynesian rat, to which they took a liking. Rather, their habit of hunting for their prey on the ground left them vulnerable to cats and stoats introduced by Europeans in the mid-1800s, which not only killed the owls but also competed for their prey.

The laughing owl was still common at the time of European colonisation of New Zealand, its cries were described variously as "A peculiar barking noise ... just like the barking of a young dog" or "A melancholy hooting note". Presumably at times their calls were also like laughter. My favourite description, clearly from someone who has spent time in a sizeable gay bar before it fills up: "Precisely the same as two men "cooeying" to each other from a distance".