The Great Horned Owl: Silent But Deadly

Jackie Scharfenberg, Retired DNR Naturalist
6 days ago
2 min read

Shhhhhh! Now that my silent nightly foray for food has been disturbed, let me introduce myself – I am Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus).

We are Wisconsin’s largest year-round resident owl coming in at a height of 18-24 inches, weighing 2-5.5 pounds, and possessing an impressive 40–60-inch wingspan.

HABITAT

Our range stretches from the tundra treeline in Alaska and Canada through North America into central South America. We prefer to inhabit young woods interspersed with open areas including suburbs and cities, swamps, deserts, and all kinds of forests.

APPEARANCE

We come packed with an amazing arsenal of adaptations to find our prey at night. Our mottled gray/brown feathers, resembling tree bark, camouflages us while we sit patiently looking and listening for prey and sleep during the day. Our white throat patch identifies us from the other species of owls.

Our ears are tucked under the feathers on the outer edge of our facial disc. This disc acts like a satellite dish focusing sound to our ears. One ear is slightly lower than the other assisting in the triangulation of our prey’s location. Head bobbing also helps with triangulation. Our hearing is up to ten times better than humans.

Our yellow eyes are not round like marbles, but more cylindrical. This shape allows our eyes to act more like a telephoto lens for farther distance sight and provide a wide, almost completely binocular field of view. With our large eyes and rod-packed retina, we see extremely well in low light. Think of only needing a birthday candle to see an entire football field. Our cylindrical eyes cannot roll like human’s eyeballs. Instead, we can turn our heads up to 270 degrees in either direction.

We fly in silence due to the fluffy, soft feathers covering our bodies that help deaden sound and our unique wings. Located on each wing’s leading edge are serrations that disrupt the turbulence generated by wing flapping. The trailing fringe of feathers works to finish cutting flight sounds. Our rounded board wings work well for maneuvering among the trees and flying at very slow speeds, two mph while gliding on a breeze to about 40 mph in level flight.

Our large, powerful legs, feet and talons complete the arsenal. With at least 300 psi, we can crush the spin of an animal or pierce internal organs. Smaller prey we swallow whole while larger prey is torn with our beaks into smaller pieces. After a while, the undigestible bones and fur are regurgitated as a two- to three-inch-long pellet.

DIET

We brag of the most diverse diet of all North American raptors. We eat mostly mammals and birds such as rabbits, mice, voles, other owls, ducks but also consume bats, frogs, and even large insects. Since we cannot smell, we are one of the few predators of skunks. Think of us as great rodent control. A family of two adults and two young require six to twelve voles/mice each night.