So this is Threatening Baby, sitting up a tree where he can't have walked up. In the first photo he's staring at Tinky-Winky, if you're wondering. I don't know if he's hunting for himself yet, but he's sure interested in her. Most owls like to look at her, because she looks so tasty.
One thing you can see here is that Threatening Baby already has much of his non-fuzzy juvenal plumage, whereas Glaring Baby still has a lot of raggeddy-looking baby down. This causes me to wonder how many days apart they are. There didn't seem to be a huge size difference when they were both fungal-looking fuzzy things huddled together on a tree trunk, but once they started moving about, Threatening Baby was clearly well ahead in his developmental stages. The book I'm reading right now (The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behaviour), though otherwise a treasure trove of information, doesn't say much about owls, possibly because Mr. Sibley lives in the US where there is night in the summer and so owls aren't easy to observe. It does mention about some other species however, that the hatchlings who call the loudest or most persistently get fed the most, then they grow up faster, then they become more independent and start calling less, and so as the more assertive siblings get older, the quieter ones, if still alive, start getting more attention; the result being that the parents don't have to feed every chick intensively at the same time, and therefore each chick gets a chance to be the centre of attention as needed. Pretty cool, huh? So, maybe great horned owls do that too. And maybe I need a book dedicated entirely to the life and behaviour of great horned owls.
Of course Sibley also doesn't mention how many days apart owls lay their eggs or how many eggs they lay. Again, that whole cryptic nightbird thing. Most birds in the book lay eggs every 24 to 48 hours. Now these two babies look a lot more than 48 hours apart to me, so... Who knows. Maybe there was a middle child who didn't make it and these two are four days apart. Another possibility, judging by some of the other birds in the book, would be that two females laid one egg each in the same nest. I'm still under the impression that I've seen two different adults at the site, and in species where both parents raise the young, some times females who can't get their own man will lay eggs in a mated female's nest so their babies still get to have two parents. Clever, eh? So yeah, maybe these two are actually half-siblings and the younger one's mother is AWOL. But, I've never heard or seen three adults in this area, and there is at least one other site where at least one other great horned owl lives, quite far way, which suggests that they have rather vast territories, so... I have no idea.
In any case, Threatening Baby is alive and flying, and Glaring Baby is alive and almost ready to fly. I'm glad.
Almost all the photos in these two posts are in 1600 ISO, by the way, in case you're wondering why they're not quite as awesome. So in fact, considering it's 21:48 in the woods, they're extremely awesome.
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