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A couple of years ago I went to an owl cafe in Tokyo. I held three owls there, but unfortunately I can only remember the species of two of them. I would really appreciate some help identifying what owl this small guy is. I have a feeling he's a scops owl, but I don't know which kind? Maybe the information is written right there in Japanese, but I have no idea. The feather belongs to him too and I can add more photos of it out of the plastic if that would help!

(I apologise for the selfie and the terrible quality of the photos!)

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So I had a google search for owl cafes in Japan - and most of them are in Tokyo (as you might expect). I looked at the websites for 3 of them and found Cafe MohuMohu.

Passing this website through google translate (translated) gave me an indication that the big green button on the front page was for their owl "Friends" page. Clicking on this (in the untranslated page) leads to pictures of their owls. The closest of which is the one called "Tobio", not "Koromo" as your first picture indicates. If you translate the "Friends" page it tells you that Tobio is a spic scoon owl - which is not a real species of owl as far as I can tell, and is very likely a translation failure.

I suspect that the owl you are holding there is indeed a Scops Owl - they are a very diverse group of owls. So, which one of the many is it? Well, it just so happens that there is one species of Scops Owl, called the Japanese Scops Owl (Otus semitorques), which is about the right size and coloration, and has very prominent ear-tufts and a pale facial disc, similar to the owl that you are holding (more photos here).

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  • oh wow, thank you so much for the effort you put into finding out this information! Looking at the photos of the Japanese Scops Owl, he really does look similar! Very very similar actually. Thank you so much for pointing me in this direction, I really appreciate it!
    – Pine
    Aug 6, 2020 at 23:45

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