During a field excursion in the lowland forests of Costa Rica’s Corcovado National Park, researchers observed a novel predation event: an ornate hawk-eagle catching and killing a crested owl.
The predation of a crested owl (Lophostrix cristata) by an ornate hawk-eagle (Spizaetus ornatus) has, to the knowledge of the scientists, never been documented before this record.
What makes the incident even more extraordinary is the arrival of a third raptor species: a common black hawk (Buteogallus anthracinus). The stocky hawk, which had been following the event intently from nearby, was seen swooping in to try to steal the kill – a feeding strategy known as kleptoparasitism, where one animal deliberately takes food from another.
Not willing to give up its meal, the eagle aggressively fought off the intruder and retained the owl, before moving it to a high branch within the forest.
Location where the ornate hawk-eagle preyed upon a crested owl in Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica. Credit: José Manuel Mora et al., Caribbean Journal of Science 2026
Ornate hawk-eagles, found in the tropical Americas, are powerful birds with a wingspan of more than one metre. They are known to prey on a wide variety of medium-sized birds and mammals, including cracids (a type of Neotropical bird), toucans, monkeys and squirrels. “However, direct observations of intraguild predation events involving owls are exceptional,” say the authors. Intraguild predation is when species competing for the same resource or prey also kill and eat each other.
The team, who published their findings recently in the Caribbean Journal of Science, say the record suggests that “even medium-sized nocturnal raptors [such as crested owls] may occasionally be vulnerable to attack by large forest eagles.
“While a single observation cannot determine the frequency of such events,” they note, “reporting them adds to the baseline knowledge of predator-prey dynamics in tropical raptor assemblages.”
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To image credit: Pablo Largaespada Caamaño | José Manuel Mora et al., Caribbean Journal of Science 2026, under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.