Great horned owls are back!

The great horned owl chicks left the nest in the night of June 16. That doesn't mean they can fly; they just leap out of the nest and try to hang on to branches to break their fall to the ground. Then, they hiked a far ways to a sheltered spot on the riverbank, where you could hear them but not see them. So I knew where the babies were, but I wasn't gonna go looking for them. Then today, on our afternoon walk, I found this:


Stretching Baby, sitting up a tree. Great horned owls are actually awesome climbers. They can walk up a vertical tree. Which makes sense, really, consider what evil claws they have. So when they're learning to fly, the chicks jump from a tree, fall, catch themselves any way they can, and so on to the ground. Then they climb back up and do it again and again and again, until they figure it out.

This seems very precocious compared to the ones from two years ago, both in terms of his motor skills and how advanced his molting is. That's too bad. If they learn to fly early they'll leave early, and I like having them around.

In the evening, I found Sulking Baby as well, thusly:


It looks like a horrible mutant with two bodies and one head, but actually Stretching Baby (left) has his head down and behind the leaves.

Notice, by the way, how Stretching Baby has this habit of stopping what he's doing to stare at me with big friendly eyes. That's very cute, but not a good quality in an owl. I hope he's just curious about his world, but I suspect he might be simply too accustomed to humans, which is unlikely to do him any good later on.


And this is a detail from the previous photo. Crappy resolution, but look at the size of those claws!!!

Stretching Baby

This is the other owl baby, the one I didn't name Sulking Baby. I'm thinking Sulking Baby is actually the younger one. Anyway, this one was busy beating his wings, which owl babies do to prepare to learn to fly. I imagine other species too, but I don't get to observe other species as much. So anyway, he was sitting on a branch beating his wings, but then he saw me and apparently I'm more interesting to baby owls than trying to fly, so he kept staring at me instead of beating his wings some more so I could get pictures. So, I name him Stretching Baby.

Where's Waldo?

Owl baby has a time-out

I wonder where the other owlet is. Hopefully just lying down, as opposed to, say, dead. Maybe this baby is in time-out for throwing his baby brother out of the nest.


Now this baby has to have a name. In 2009 there was Glaring Baby and Threatening Baby. To continue in the same spirit, I'm naming this one Sulking Baby.

It's too bad I don't speak Chinese, it would sound much more poetic that way.

I dub thee "Smiley"

I hate it when people call me "Smiley", but owls don't care. They just look surly all the time because of their colours and they're not interested in my opinion.

I hope to be reborn as a bird so I can not give a hoot (haha, a pun!) about people's opinions. And crap on their cars, too.

Anyway, all this to say, these photos are not cropped. I was actually that close to him. Plus the massive zoom, of course.


This one is a crop. Doesn't he look all warm and fuzzy like a teddy bear?

A few bonus owl photos

Notice how this male is silver instead of brown? I'm assuming that's for better camouflage among the silvery tree trunks. That's why I hardly ever see him.

Four owls in one photo

Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean there aren't four owls in this photo. Would I lie to you about owls? Look:


Seriously, one:


Two, three, four:


For greater clarity:


Two baby owls. The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior says that owls lay 2 to 8 eggs at 1 to 2 day intervals and hatching is asynchronous, which explains why there was one chick and then another chick. It also means that there could still be more chicks hatching, but I'm not holding my breath. It's a lot of work raising owl chicks. The book also says that the chicks are altricial, meaning under-developed. They hatch with eyes closed, sparse down, and unable to raise their heads. This means that these guys were not hatched yesterday and today. In fact, considering when I saw the owls mating, and how long great horned owls incubate, these guys probably hatched about a month ago already.