Great Horned Owlet, and a favored food

 

A young, and still quite fuzzy, Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus). It was one of two owlets fledged from a nest in a small west-central Ohio woodlot. The stick nest that they were born in looked like an old Red-shouldered Hawk nest to me - not very large, and in the crotch of a large maple about three-quarters the way up the tree. About half of the Great Horned Owl nests in this region utilize the abandoned stick platform nests of raptors and herons, and the other half use natural tree cavities.

The bird in the photo was not long out of the nest but can already make short flights. Its nestmate was in a nearby tree, but much higher up. The female owl was not far off, either.

An Eastern Cottontail poses in a violet patch in my backyard yesterday. At least three bunnies call my yard home, and this one is the largest. He's the size of a small cat.

Great Horned Owls prey heavily on rabbits. I'm sure that the young owl in my photo has dined on rabbit on numerous occasions. The male owl brings most if not all food to the juveniles, with the female pitching in if need be.

Cottontails breed prolifically and one pair can raise scores of kits over a year's time. Most will not make it to the size of the chap above, though. Rabbits are high on the menu for a raft of predators, not just owls.

Years ago, I was trolling a gravel lane in the wee hours in the middle of nowhere in Pike County, Ohio, conducting owl surveys for the Ohio Breeding Bird Atlas. Rounding a bend in the road - at very slow speeds, fortunately - I came across a Great Horned Owl sitting in the middle of the lane, freshly caught cottontail in its talons. The owl was not pleased with my appearance, and if looks could kill I would not be writing this. Its rabbit victim was so large that the owl could not get off the ground with it, so the burly owl physically dragged the bunny to a nearby embankment and hauled its prey up that. I then idled by at close range and on down the road, leaving the winged tiger to its rabbit steak.

Two cool raptors

Maybe once a year, I get hit with the flu/cold/whatever it is, and it hammers me for a day or so. This was the week, and the flu-cold shut me down on Tuesday. Other than that, I made it to work every day. Unfortunately, some of the ill side-effects are a bit slower to depart, and I didn't feel up to any epic travels this weekend.

So this morning, I hit a few local hotspots with certain targets in mind. Two of which follow.

As always, CLICK THE PHOTO to enlarge

It appears that one of the local Great Horned Owl pairs has commenced the business of making owlets. This cavity in a massive white oak is a site used a number of times in past years by the owls. As she's been nestled into this same spot for over a week now, she must be on eggs. A typical clutch is two eggs, and the female owl does all of the incubation. The male earns his keep by bringing regular meals to her.

Late January is right on schedule for nesting Great Horned Owls in central Ohio. The female owl's extraordinary feathering allow her to maintain an incubation temperature of about 98 degrees even when the ambient air temperature plummets to minus 20 or colder. Such early breeding syncs the arrival of the baby owlets with the peak spring activity of striped skunks. Great Horned Owls are one of few predators that regularly make meals of skunks, and this striped delicacy is an entrée regularly served to many an owlet.

An utterly fearless Merlin glares at the cameraman. There was another nearby, occupying Union Cemetery in Columbus. They've been present all winter, and are remarkably tame even by urban Merlin standards. Nonetheless, I would not advise getting TOO close. One hundred or so feet away is plenty near for outstanding views, and the bird or birds will probably not even bother to register your existence at that range. Lest you wonder how I could get such a frame-filling image from afar, I was using a telephoto rig with the equivalent to about a 1120mm focal length.

The Merlin stretches his appendages during a bout of preening. I noticed that his right foot and leg were still bloody. These small falcons are bird specialists, and I suspect the blood issued from a hapless songbird of some sort - maybe a starling if luck is with us.

I'm trying to force myself to be somewhat mellow until this flu-thing fades completely, so after about an hour with the Merlins, I headed for home. I'll hope to get back for some more, though. They're great fun to watch, because sooner or later, the hunger pangs will strike and the falcon will go on the hunt. Few things are as remarkable as the spectacle of one of these feathered bullets turning on the juice, flying down some luckless bird, and pulverizing it.

Great Horned Owl owlet

A gargantuan white oak, Quercus alba, towers over a central Ohio park. Its gnarled boughs predate the founding of the City of Columbus, the municipality in which the tree resides. Over its centuries of growth, this ancient woody Methuselah has spawned enough animals to fill a small ark. Tens of thousands of caterpillars have noshed on its foliage. In turn, the caterpillars fed (and feed) legions of migratory songbirds that stop to rest and refuel in the oak's branches. Scores of squirrels have harvested its seasonal bounty of acorns. Southern Flying Squirrels have glided from limb to limb. Hawks have used the tree as a lookout post. And in this very photo, there lurks our most ferocious avian predator of all.

A cavity created by the loss of a giant limb provides a nesting spot for a pair of Great Horned Owls. Here we see the female occupying the nest cavity. She could easily be overlooked, as her plumage matches the wood of the tree quite well. I made this image back on April 1, and the owl had good reason to still be occupying the nest cavity.

This is her feathered charge - a tiny, fluffy owlet. At this stage, the adult female owl spends much time in the nest; a formidable defender of the owlet.

Great Horned Owl owlets basically sleep (and yawn), eat, and engage in one function related to the latter. And grow like weeds.

 I had the chance to revisit the nest site almost three weeks after the preceding photos were taken, on April 19, and my how our owlet has grown. The chick, while still heavily fuzzed with down, is nearly the size of the adult.

Great Horned Owls can have as many as four chicks, although two is probably most common, at least around here. In this case, the other egg(s) may not have hatched, or something possibly led to the other chicks' demise shortly after hatching. This one is doing quite well, though.

Owls have nested at this place for as long as I can remember, although they typically shift nest trees from year to year. By now, this owlet is out of the nest and free-flying. This isn't the first Great Horned Owl owlet spawned in this massive oak, and I suspect it'll play nursery for many more to come.

NOTE ON PHOTOS: The nest cavity can be seen from some distance away (if one knows where to look). In the morning, the sun is to one's back creating excellent lighting. I made these images with either a Canon 5D Mark III or crop-sensor 7D Mark II with a 500 mm fitted with a 1.4x teleconverter. Such camera rigs allow one to keep far away, and still get "keepers" without bothering the birds. Nesting owls should never be approached closely. I'm reluctant to mention the exact site, as all too often publicized owl nests can attract scads of people and such activity can lead to nest failure.

Great Horned Owl

Photo: Gary Meszaros

A big female Great Horned Owl stands sentinel at the entrance to her nest site, a broken snag. Gary Meszaros took this photo the other day near Cleveland, and (obviously) gave me permission to share it. This is without doubt one of the coolest images of this species that I've seen. To see more of Gary's work, CLICK HERE.

Great Horned Owls are surprisingly common, and no doubt lurk near you. They are the nocturnal analogs to Red-tailed Hawks, so if you see the latter chances are good the big owls are around, too. In fact, the most common nest site for these owls, in these parts, are the nests of Red-tailed Hawks. If the larger more powerful owls decide to appropriate a hawk nest, tough luck to the rusty-tailed raptor. A distant second regarding nest sites are broken-off tree snags, such as in Gary's photo. A small percentage of owls will modify squirrel drays for nests. A dray is a leafy arboreal nest of tree squirrels. Occasionally an owl pair will commandeer a Great Blue Heron nest, creating an uneasy alliance when the herons return to their rookery.

The big owls commence nesting in the midst of winter. Eggs are commonly laid between mid-January and mid-February, and at least some nests will be full of owlets by now. The downy white owlets grow with startling rapidity, and before long resemble fuzzy grocery sacks. Their parents ply them with all manner of food - Great Horned Owls have the most diverse diet of any of our owls. Even skunks are not off limits.

The Great Horned Owl is one of my favorite birds, and I've amassed a significant body of unforgettable memories involving these "winged tigers" (in the words of Ernest Thompson Seton). Once, while cruising a back road in Ross County in the darkness, I rounded a corner and there was a Great Horned Owl in the middle of the road. It had a freshly killed rabbit. The owl ran me through with its piercing yellow gaze, and refused to leave its kill. Finally, the prey being too much to get airborne, it stumble-flapped its victim up the road bank and into the bush.

Another time, I was passing through the heart of the Ohio State University's campus, at 15th Avenue and High Street, not far from downtown Columbus, when the giant shape of a horned owl whisked ghostlike through the intersection. Some owls are quite the urbanites, and woe to any rat that crosses their path.

Several years ago, a Great Horned Owl nest was discovered mere feet from busy Cleveland Avenue in Columbus. It had appropriated a Red-tailed Hawk nest high in a silver maple on the grounds of St. Ann's Hospital. Word got out, the Columbus Dispatch featured the owl in its pages, and the rush began. The hospital ended up cordoning off a big chunk of parking lot to accommodate the throngs of admirers. Thousands of people must have seen that fierce-looking owl as she sit high above, occasionally deigning to glance down at the assembled rabble with her glaring eyes. In spite of her innate ability to make us feel less than, everyone was thoroughly charmed by the animal.

We've come a long way in our attitudes towards high-end predators such as the Great Horned Owl. It wasn't that long ago that owls and hawks were routinely shot on sight, sometimes to the point of utter elimination. Less than a century ago, it would have been very hard to find a Great Horned Owl in the region where Meszaros made this photo. Nearly all of them had been shot out.

Keep a close eye on hawk and heron nests in your travels. Sooner or later, you'll see the telltale ear tufts of a Great Horned Owl sticking over the top, or the big pieces of white fuzz which are the owlets.

Tigers of the air make tigerlets

Sharp-eyed Bob Baran spotted this old Red-tailed Hawk nest, high in the boughs of a silver maple, while stuck in traffic. See it? There, in the upper right corner of the photo.

Well, Red-tails made the nest but someone bigger and far tougher has come along and appropriated it.

Bob took a close look and spotted telltale ear tufts projecting above the nest. Great Horned Owl! Bob was good enough to let me know where the nest was, which turned out to only be 15 minutes or so from where I live in western Franklin County, Ohio. Look closely - she is staring daggers at your blogger, ears erect and visible on the nest's left side.
BOTANY LESSON: Those little red globules are the flowers of the silver maple, our first tree to burst into bloom. But the owl gives not a whit of such stuff. They are strict carnivores with no interest in namby-pamby vegetarian stuff. Had the owls even suspected that I knew about and was interested in such matters as flowers, they probably would have set upon me and torn your narrator asunder.

Some Great Horned Owls use large tree cavities created by broken-off branches or other such damage, but in these parts most use the stick nests created by raptors, especially Red-tailed Hawks. The hard-working legitimate nest owners can squeal and circle all they like, but it'll be for naught. Nothing rivals the Great Horned Owl for sheer ferocity in the bird world, at least in my neck of the woods, and they take what they want.

Very early nesters, Great Horned Owls are sitting on eggs now, and should you espy a hawk's nest, pull out the binocs and have a gander. Perhaps you, too, will see the Tufts of Doom jutting from the twiggy jumble. Great Blue Heron rookeries are always worth a search, as the owls frequent comandeer one of the lanky-legged wader's abodes. As herons return early to their colonies, an uneasy truce sets in as the birds set up house-keeping while trying to ignore the killers in their midst.

The male owl was perched in a gnarly tangle of branches, not far from where his mate warmed their eggs. These birds are legitimate bada**es - there is just no other way to put it. I've seen scores of Great Horned Owls over the years, and never fail to be struck by the absolute ferocity that they project. Those glaring yellow eyes pierce you with a withering stare that would be terrifying if one were potential prey. A bird with such prominent ear tufts could run the risk of appearing comical or clownlike, but in the case of the Great Horned Owl, they only add to the purposeful, slightly sinister look.

This is NOT a silhouette that you want darkening your doorstep if you are a rabbit, skunk, or cat. Swift and silent, horned owls will give no warning of their approach. The leading edges of their flight feathers are fimbriate, or fringed, and thus muffle the sound of air passing by the wings.

I, for one, am quite pleased that there are Great Horned Owls living nearby. They are common in the City of Columbus, and I sometimes hear a pair duetting from my window. The male's HOO's are deep and basso; hers are higher in pitch.

Common as they may be, it isn't everyday that one gets to see a nest and I thank Bob for tipping me to this one. If time allows, I'll try and get back and check on them. We had an absolute humdinger of a thunderstorm blow through here last night, and hopefully the owls got through that with eggs intact. We could use some more Tigers of the Air around here.