“…Mitochondria are characterized by maternal inheritance, high conservation, multiple copies in cells, low sequence recombination rate, and high evolutionary rate, widely used in phylogenetic studies (Yan et al, 2017; Sun et al, 2020), and be able to accurately infer phylogenetic relationships in birds (Tuinen et al, 2000), while complete mitochondrial genomes generally have higher accuracy than partial mitochondrial genes (Haring et al, 2001; Harrison et al, 2004). Previous studies have defined the phylogenetic position of S. aluco using a single gene or a combination of multiple mitochondrial genes (Heidrich and Wink, 1994; Yu et al, 2021; Li et al, 2022; Fuchs et al, 2008; Wood et al, 2017). Earlier studies identified the monophyly of Strigiformes phylogeny through the cytochrome B (Cyt B) gene (Wink and Heidrich, 2000), through skeletal comparison, Striginae were divided into three subfamilies: Striginae (13 genera), Surniinae (8 genera) and Asioninae (2 genera) (Salter et al, 2020).…”