Great Horned Owls are live in many diverse habitats across North America. I see them in deserts, mountains, coastlines, and urban environments.
Like a chameleon, their coloring mimics the bark of trees in their home range. Great Horned Owls that I see in Alaska are white to blend in with the snowy landscape and birch trees. In ponderosa pine forests, they are reddish-yellow, to match the tree bark.
Read More
One winter night, while doing an owl survey at 12,000 feet, I encountered a huge Great Horned Owl perched on the summit of a snowy peak. Each year when I kayak a remote river in Alaska, I see a family of white-colored Great Horned owls that rarely encounter humans.
Great Horned Owls are perch hunters. They sit quietly on high perches while they look and listen for prey. Their soft wing feathers allow for totally silent flight as they glide in mid-air to unsuspecting victims.
Great Horned Owls rule the night. A family of them learned how to wait for young peregrine falcons nesting high on a cliff to grow plump before killing them at night. Studying this falcon eyrie, we perplexed on what was killing the endangered falcons. The knowledge of this food source of young falcons was learned, or handed down, across many generations of owls in this canyon.
Great Horned Owls are such a mortal enemy of other raptors that when a hawk sees a Great Horned Owl in daylight, they attack it. This innate behavior of hawks to attack Great Horned Owls is used by ornithologists when doing migrating raptor counts. A stuffed Great Horned Owl, or a plastic fake owl, is set up on a tall pole on top of mountain ridges on raptor migratory routes. Migrating hawks dive from thousands of feet above at the owl decoys, allowing scientists to identify and sometimes net and band the hawks.
Close to my home, a pair of Great Horned Owls would build a nest on an exposed ledge high on cliff each year. This exposed nest location was vulnerable to attacks by hawks and ravens during the daylight. The mother owl would protect her young owlets by laying down flat over them. Her camouflage made it very hard to notice her. Smart ravens eventually discovered her and attacked the nest. A few days later, I found three pairs of dead ravens along nearby cliffs. The Great Horned Owl likely dispatched all the local raven nests at night.
