In these colder months, most birds are focused on surviving the winter, not on courtship and egg laying. Their nesting season won’t begin until the weather at their breeding sites warm up and there is sufficient food for their young. Only with a reliable source of insects, fruit or seeds can bird parents offer the best chance of survival to their offspring.
For the Great Horned Owl, courtship and breeding begin now, in mid-winter. They start their families earlier than most birds, timing their chick rearing to coincide with more abundant prey in late winter. Their early start also provides chicks with the extra time needed to become proficient hunters before winter arrives again.
What these successful hunters eat is evident in their pellets, those regurgitated balls of indigestible bits which are dissected in many science classrooms (although most commercially available owl pellets are from Barn Owls). Owl pellets also are a convenient way for researchers to study Great Horned Owl dietary changes in response to their locations or environmental changes, including after forest fires and in desert locations.
Watch a video of a singing Great Horned Owl here. Haikuboxes identify this amazing bird across their range. Below is the spectrogram shows the visualization from this Haikubox recording. Learn more about spectrograms in our recorded webinar "How to Read a Spectrogram."
