Great Horned Owl
Bubo virginianus
Compiled by Yvonne Karnath
There is a particular kind of cold January night in Central Texas — clear, dry, the live oaks rustling just a little — when you can walk to the end of your driveway, stand still for a minute, and hear it: a deep, rolling hoo-hoo-hooooo-hoo-hoo from somewhere down the greenbelt, answered a few seconds later by a slightly higher voice from the next street over. That duet is the most reliable winter sound in Travis County, and it belongs to a pair of Great Horned Owls already deep into their breeding season while most of our other birds are still wintering in Mexico.
The Great Horned Owl is, without much competition, the most widely distributed true owl in the Americas. Cornell’s All About Birds describes it as “equally at home in deserts, wetlands, forests, grasslands, backyards, cities, and almost any other semi-open habitat between the Arctic and the tropics.” That kind of flexibility means almost every Travis Audubon member has one within earshot of home, whether they live in West Lake Hills, on a ranch out toward Manor, or in an apartment near Town Lake. If you have mature trees and a little bit of open ground nearby, you have habitat.
Physically, this is one of the easiest owls in North America to identify. It is big — twenty to twenty-five inches tall, with a wingspan of four to five feet — and stocky, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest. The two long feather tufts on top of the head (the “horns” of the name) are not ears at all, just decoration that helps the bird break up its silhouette against a tree trunk. The face is a warm rust-tan disc bordered in black, the eyes are large and yellow, and there is a clean white throat patch that flashes when the bird hoots. The belly is finely barred horizontally, and the back is a soft, mottled mix of brown, gray, and cream that makes a roosting owl essentially invisible until it blinks.
Color tone varies more than people expect. Birds from the Pacific Northwest tend to be sooty and dark; birds from subarctic Canada can be almost white; and birds in the Southwest, including our Texas Hill Country, lean pale and gray, which is helpful camouflage against the limestone and lichen-covered live oaks. If you see what looks like an unusually pale Great Horned Owl in Travis County, it probably is one — that is just our local flavor.
What really makes this bird remarkable, though, is what it eats. The Great Horned Owl is the dietary generalist of North American raptors. Cornell lists it as one of the few regular predators of skunks (owls have a famously poor sense of smell, which works out for them and very poorly for the skunks), and the menu otherwise runs from cottontails, jackrabbits, rats, and voles to ducks, geese, herons, Eastern Screech-Owls, and even other Great Horned Owls. The grip strength of those feet is around 28 pounds of force per square inch, more than enough to kill prey heavier than the owl itself. If something edible moves in the dark in Texas, a Great Horned Owl has probably eaten one of its cousins.
Breeding starts absurdly early. While most Texas songbirds are still months away from courtship, Great Horned Owls are pairing up in November, hooting at each other through December, and incubating eggs in January and early February. They do not build their own nests; they appropriate. An old Red-tailed Hawk platform, a Great Blue Heron stick nest, a hollow in a sycamore, a ledge on a limestone bluff, even an abandoned squirrel drey will do. Two to four eggs is typical, laid a few days apart, and the female starts incubating with the first one, so chicks hatch at different sizes and ages. By the time spring migration is building steam in March and April, Great Horned Owl families are already feeding nearly full-grown young.
The most fun part of learning this species is learning the voice. The textbook mnemonic for the male’s call is “Who’s awake? Me too” — five notes, deep and resonant. The female’s voice is noticeably higher-pitched, despite her being the larger bird, and a courting pair will trade hoots back and forth for minutes at a time. Begging young, on the other hand, sound nothing like adults — a juvenile Great Horned Owl produces a long, scratchy, raspy screech that has launched a hundred “what is that horrible noise outside my window” questions to local birders every June.
Where to look in Travis County? Honestly, almost anywhere with mature trees. Roosting birds spend daylight hours pressed against a trunk in a live oak, pecan, or cypress, often given away by mobbing crows or jays. Reliable spots include Hornsby Bend, Roy Guerrero Park, Commons Ford Ranch, Mayfield Park, the Wild Basin Wilderness Preserve, and the wooded edges of any of the Hill Country greenbelts. Listen at dusk and again about an hour before dawn — that is when the calling is at its peak from October through March.
Once you start paying attention, you may find that you have been sharing your neighborhood with a Great Horned Owl all along. That is part of what makes this bird such a satisfying one to know. It is enormous, fierce, and famous, and yet it manages to live almost invisibly among us, hooting quietly from the dark while the rest of the city sleeps.
Sources:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org
https://ebird.org
https://txtbba.tamu.edu/species-accounts/great-horned-owl/
https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/great-horned-owl
