GPS Tag Reveals Owl Flew 1,848 Km Nonstop From Japan to the Philippines

A northern boobook, an owl species about 30 centimeters long, flew more than 1,800 kilometers nonstop over the sea from Japan to the Philippines, according to a study by a research team that includes Japan's Tohoku University. The finding came from GPS data loggers the researchers attached to four northern boobooks living in Sendai, the capital of Miyagi Prefecture in northeastern Japan.

In Japan, the owl lives in a wide range of places except areas such as the Ogasawara Islands, and it breeds in locations including parks in urban areas during summer. While it was already known that the species spends winter in Southeast Asia, its migratory routes had not been known in detail. An analysis of data from one of the four tagged birds, published last summer, traced its full journey for the first time.

The male owl traveled south over the Japanese archipelago in late October 2024, then flew 1,848 kilometers nonstop over the sea from Cape Sata in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, to Luzon island in the Philippines — a trip of 36 hours. It then spent about four months on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan over winter, before traveling roughly 1,500 kilometers to Hainan island in southern China in late March 2025. After flying north over mainland China, it returned to Sendai in late April.

The study "revealed a new aspect of owls running counter to people's notion that they don't move," said Yawara Takeda, a Tohoku University researcher specializing in developmental biology. "If its migratory routes and resting locations are identified, that would help preserve the species," Takeda said. The study was published in a British scientific journal in June.