Why are barn owls a model system for sound localization?

In 1971, Roger Payne published the paper ‘Acoustic Location of Prey by Barn Owls (Tyto alba)’. Payne had conducted the underlying experiments at Cornell University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for his PhD, which he obtained in 1961. When the paper was published, Payne, a zoologist, was a professor at Rockefeller University. By that time he was already famous for his discovery of songs in humpback whales. Payne later left academia and started to promote conservation of whales, an activity he still pursues today.