Great Horned Owl Family in Summer

BirdNote^®

Great Horned Owl Family, Part IV
Great Horned Owl Family in Summer

Written by Bob Sundstrom 

This is BirdNote!
[Great Horned Owl pair hooting]
Recognize these Great Horned Owls? We’ve been following them since last winter, when the adults started nesting. We watched the two owlets hatch early in spring, high in a tall cottonwood tree. Throughout the spring, their fierce hunter-parents airlifted in meal after meal, everything from delectable ducks to smelly skunks.
[Great Horned Owl pair hooting] 
At four and a half months old, the young owls must fend for themselves much of the time. Room service is not what is used to be! [Juvenile screeching “feed me!”] But still we see them perched near their parents. The young birds continue to learn valuable lessons by watching the adults hunt.
The young owls’ first hunting forays were clumsy. Early on, they caught no more than large insects, but now they’ve graduated to mice. The owlets must learn quickly about hazards, like not hunting too close to the nearby country road, where cars and trucks pose a deadly threat. Collisions with vehicles kill many owls.
[Sound of vehicles driving rapidly by]
They’ll stay with their parents into the fall. It takes a long time to raise a Great Horned Owl to independent adulthood.
 [Great Horned Owl pair hooting]
For BirdNote, I’m Mary McCann. Support for BirdNote comes from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, presenting its new “Bird Photography” online course, featuring Melissa Groo. Learn more at academy.allaboutbirds.org.
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Great Horned Owl duet provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Recorded by W.R. Fish.
Ambient recordings by Chris Peterson and John Kessler Productions.
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
© 2012 Tune In to Nature.org     July 2017/2020     Narrator: Mary McCann

ID# 072106GHOWKPLU            GHOW-06c