Tropical Screech-Owl

How to find it

Plan to look after dark, since it only becomes active a good while after nightfall. Screech-owls are best identified by their calls, so listen first and look second. Try open groves, hedgerows along stream edges, coffee farms, scrub and suburban areas with trees. Spotlighting in big hotel gardens in the Central Valley is one suggested approach, and roosting birds have been looked for in bamboo clumps. Be patient: one Central Valley guide hears it now and then from shade coffee farms but almost never sees one.

How to recognise it

This is a small owl, about 23 cm and 160 g. Look for these marks:

Greyish plumage, heavily streaked.

A pale grey face disk with a clear black border.

Yellow eyes.

Fully feathered legs.

White underparts with a fine herringbone pattern made by dark streaks along the feather shafts.

Short ear tufts, raised mostly during the day.

Colour varies across the species. Most birds are grey-brown, and brown and rufous morphs exist too. The rufous phase is described as very rare in Costa Rica, and even then the black edge to the face disc still identifies the bird.

What it sounds like

Recording: Arthur de Jesús Chavarría Pérez, CC BY 4.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

It is nocturnal and active only a good while after dark. By day it sleeps in dense foliage, often leaning against a tree trunk, or in a tangle or tree cavity. At night it hunts from a low perch, taking prey from the ground, from branches or in flight.

Its diet is mainly arthropods such as crickets, beetles, moths and scorpions. It sometimes takes snakes, bats and small mammals. It nests in a tree hollow, knot, empty stump or old woodpecker hole, with clutches of 2 to 4 eggs and breeding from February to April.

Where it lives

In Costa Rica it is a resident of foothills and slopes, roughly 400 to 1500 m, with 1500 m given as the upper limit. It is local from the Tilaran range south to Panama, mostly on the Pacific slope.

It likes open groves, hedgerows along stream edges, coffee farms, scrub and suburban areas with trees. Across its range it uses savannah with scattered trees, forest edges, second growth, plantations and town parks, and it generally avoids the densest interior rainforest. It is listed among the birds of the Greater Metropolitan Area, the Central Valley urban region, and appears on the bird list of Cloudbridge Nature Reserve.

Similar birds

Four screech-owls live in Costa Rica and look very alike, so combine range, looks and voice. The black border around the face disc and the voice separate it from Vermiculated Screech-Owl, which is a similar size but found at slightly higher elevations. Pacific Screech-Owl replaces it in drier habitats, is paler and more evenly brown with little dark edging on the face disc, and has a rolling staccato call. The two can occur near each other in the eastern Central Valley, for example near Alajuela. Tropical and Bare-shanked Screech-Owls may overlap on mountain passes of the Central Volcanic range, at middle to upper slope elevations, so take care there.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

Costa Ricans call it estucurú or sorococa, and the official Spanish name is Lechucita Neotropical. Both local names are shared with the other Megascops screech-owls in the country, and locals use them loosely for all of them. A Costa Rican paper notes a belief that only the estucurú occurs in the country, which the authors correct with evidence.

Status and conservation

The AOCR list marks it as a resident (R), and across its range the IUCN rates it Least Concern.

Photography tips

This owl calls little, avoids daylight and stays hidden, so photographs take patience. A photographer in the Central Valley found a pair nesting in a tree cavity, which is a reminder to check hollows, knots and stumps. Keep disturbance low around any nest.