Tawny Owl (Wild Life by Schleich)

Welcome to the Animal Toy Blog. Since I have the honor of posting the first review, I thought I would pick a figure that just arrived in the mail today, the tawny owl, Strix aluco Linnaeus, 1758, which was released by Schleich in 1999.

For those of you that know me, you know I am a professional parasitologist and entomologist, and historically my collection has focused on arthropods. A little over a year ago, I started building a Synoptic Collection of one figure each of non-arthropod figures. This tawny owl is my exemplar for this species.

The tawny owl is a medium-sized bird native to the western Palearctic. It makes sense a company like Schleich, based in Germany, would showcase this species. Adults are about 38-46 cm long with 81-105 cm wingspan. Like most owls, they are nocturnal predators of smaller animals, including rodents, lagomorphs, birds, and invertebrates.

The figure measures 5.4 cm tall, with the owl itself being 5.0 cm tall, making the figure 1:7.5-1:9.0 in scale, so just shy of 1:10. It is made of a single, solid piece of PVC and sits permanently attached to a stump base (for those of you who have following me on any of the forums know I love figures on bases). The detail on this figure is great, as are Schleich’s more ‘vintage’ figures. It has a very good likeness for this species.

Overall, this figure is recommended for collectors of general animals, birds, or species collectors (like myself). To my knowledge, the only other representative of this species is one by Hausser Elastolin from the 1970s.

Here it is with select other owls by other manufacturers. From left to right: Oriental scops owl (Kaiyodo), long-eared owl (Safari LTD), tawny owl (reviewed here), barn owl (Papo), and African grass owl (Yowie USA).