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Short-eared owls (Asio flammeus) are capable of crossing long stretches of open water and have been successful colonisers of islands. In the central and western Pacific two established populations (on Hawai’i and on Pohnpei in Micronesia) seem to be the foci of repeated dispersal events. The paper reviews the historic and linguistic record for the occurrence of short-eared owls on the scattered atolls of the Marshall Islands, the easternmost group of Micronesia.