Great Horned Owl (Cool: 2014, house, buy)

[BevoLJ]

I have a Great Horned Owl in my backyard right now. I hadn't seen one in a while and it scared the crap out of me just a few minutes ago.

I was on my back deck watering my potted plants and it hooted that super loud deep hoot they do and scared the crap out of me. Can you imagine being a mouse and hearing that hoot? That would be like a lions roar to us humans. Anyway I ran upstairs and started looking out my windows and sure enough I found him sitting in one of the big old oaks just on the other side of the yard from the back deck. Very beautiful creatures.

We have lots of other smaller owls. We have these little owl boxes where they nest and have babies in the spring to early summer. The babies are very cute. But this is the first Great Horned Owl we have seen in a while.

[capcat]

They're magnificent creatures. One landed atop a telephone pole in my backyard once. Pretty awesome silhouette against a moonlit sky. Unforgettable.

[CarnivalGal]

We saw one sitting on a wire behind our house a few months ago. They are very impressive indeed. I wish we saw them more often.

[twange]

Awesome. I get a lot of barred owls in my backyard (backs up to a greenbelt). I've not seen a GH yet. I'm always worried about my cats though...Those things are BIG. Owls are so fascinating.

I love this site. Has all of the different owl hoots.

Owl Calls & Sounds - All Species

[CptnRn]

Cool, we hear Sreach Owls fairly often, and even put out an Owl nesting box in our live oak tree, but have not seen any sign anyone has used it yet. '

Love to hear that woo-ooo-ooo call.

[10scoachrick]

Originally Posted by CptnRn

Cool, we hear Sreach Owls fairly often, and even put out an Owl nesting box in our live oak tree, but have not seen any sign anyone has used it yet. '

Love to hear that woo-ooo-ooo call.

My hand-crafted owl house is in a Cedar Elm. It was 'home' to squirrels for the first three years! 'Got' an owl family early this year. Pretty cool.

[BevoLJ]

Originally Posted by twange

Awesome. I get a lot of barred owls in my backyard (backs up to a greenbelt). I've not seen a GH yet. I'm always worried about my cats though...Those things are BIG. Owls are so fascinating.

I love this site. Has all of the different owl hoots.

Owl Calls & Sounds - All Species

Very cool. Thank you. He quit hooting after the sun went down. We went out to eat and came back and he is still quiet. Or he may have gone out hunting. It is to dark to see if he is still there. Our screech owls are usually noisy at night, but I have never noticed our great horned owls noisy at night. Usually around dusk and dawn when it is a bit light. I wonder why that is?

That site is really cool. The owl we had tonight sounded a little different. He was a male and sounded really deep like that. But he was only doing like a 4-5 hoo sort of hoot. Like "Ho-Ho-Hoooo-Hoooo" with either 2-3 of the short hoos they start off their hoots with. On that recording of the male one it sounded like he was doing almost a dozen of them! I don't know I have ever heard one 'hoo' that many times in a row. lol

Originally Posted by CptnRn

Cool, we hear Sreach Owls fairly often, and even put out an Owl nesting box in our live oak tree, but have not seen any sign anyone has used it yet. '

Love to hear that woo-ooo-ooo call.

I hope you get some next year! The babies are so cute. In late April and May they get out on the branches outside the box and make a HUGE racket. Very noisy. And when one falls they are even noisier. Somehow they manage to get back up. I don't know how. I don't think they can fly that young.

But we get them in our boxes from March to late May. We put the nesting material in there in winter and then clean it back out at some point during the summer. On one of the trees we had to put a metal guard so that critters don't get into it. We just went to Home Depot and they have metal you can buy and wrap around the tree and just nail it in. It seems to work alright.

[oldtoiletsmkgdflrpots]

Cool site Twange! From the sounds of it we have the horned owl pair back here too. I hear them all the time.

[G Grasshopper]

The females have a slightly higher pitched call. So especially in the late winter, listen for the back and forth of males and females calling to each other. Its really neat.