The brown fish owl is a species of owl that is part of the family known as typical owls, Strigidae, which contains most living owls. It inhabits the warm subtropical and humid tropical parts of continental Asia and some offshore islands. Of the four living species of fish owl, it is the most widely distributed, most common and best-studied. It occupies a range of over 7,000 km from eastern China to Palestine. Currently, the brown fish owl is classified in the genus Ketupa. The four fish owls were all previously generally separated in the Ketupa. mtDNA cytochrome b sequence data is equivocal on which genus name is applied for them, and they were commonly lumped with the horned and eagle-owls – which they also resemble osteologically very much – for sake of convenience. Depending on whether some little-studied tropical eagle-owls are closer to the fish-owls than to the typical eagle-owls, Ketupa might be a valid genus if these as well as the fishing owls are included in it, although there are a number of osteological differences that suggest that fishing and fish owls are not directly related to each other.
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