Great horned owlOK, it's not exactly gardening but it happened in my garden so...this weekend my wife called me over to look out the back window at a great horned owl perched in a tree over a garden. It was immense. It stayed around for a while and needless to say, there wasn't a lot of traffic at the garden bird feeders that afternoon. But what a sight! (Photo thanks to owling.com.) - Craig
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Yow, an owl
Submitted by cnienaber on October 13, 2009 - 12:22pm.
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Owls, habits of
I heard one Sunday night (I live in KCK). Their hooting is distinctive, a multi-syllable hoot ending in "hoo-ah." They aren't common here, not in the city anyway. Great horned owls don't migrate, but they can wander quite a bit, especially in the fall and winter when prey starts getting scarce. They are big. They are the heaviest owl in North America; only the Great Gray Owl is larger in size. What a neat sighting!
Good luck on the roof?
We see a lot of owls down in rural Johnson County. A friend told me that having an owl on your roof foretells good luck, Well, maybe not. Sitting on our front porch very late at night a couple weeks ago, I glimpsed something with an enormous wingspan floating by overhead and landing on our neighbors' roof. Then it began to hoot. It stayed there for a long long time, and it was so loud I had to close our bedroom windows. The neighbors told me it was on their roof every night for about a week, and the whole family had trouble sleeping. They even went outside and tried to throw things up at it and hit it with the garden hose, but it just stayed put! Finally, it found a new family to annoy.
Now that's an owl
It makes me wonder if owls, like some other wildlife, are getting more accustomed to living in urban/suburban areas. - Craig
It should earn its keep!
We could use more owls, and I wish they were better hunters! Since the neighbors lost both their cats, the mouse population has exploded down here, and I'd rather not have to use poison bait! Ugh, they got into our porch and set up house in our grill!
Mice
True. If I gave the owl the code to my garage door he'd have an all-you-can-eat buffet of mice.
It was huge, man
It was neat indeed. The owl was so big we were actually afraid to put our 34-pound dog out, even though technically he's a lot bigger. I was talking to Diane Gover at Wild Birds Unlimited this morning and she said the owl couldn't handle something as big as the dog but might swoop anyway. To be out in the day like that showed the owl was pretty hungry.