The head and back are mottled brown and the underparts whitish, with vertical bars on the chest and throat.

Mottled owls produce a range of calls which include a hoot used in maintaining territory boundaries, and various whistles, screeches and hisses.

Forty years later, a mottled owl was photographed in Starr County, Texas, and there is also a 2006 record from the same state.

[7] The mottled owl has a very wide range and the number of individual birds has been estimated to be somewhere between five hundred thousand and five million.

It is listed by the IUCN as being of "Least Concern" on the basis that, though its numbers may be decreasing slightly, they are not doing so at such a rate as would justify putting the bird in a more vulnerable category.