Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Owl?

COURTESY JEAN BEAUFORT
This is the time of year when I wish I knew my bird calls better. Every time I go for a walk, the forest seems eerily silent for much of the time, until I stumble upon a few birds foraging in the canopy or the undergrowth. They may or may not be uttering short communications to one another to keep in touch. For songbirds, these sounds include all manner of chips, cheeps, and even actual tweets.

Over the years I have learned and forgotten dozens of these calls. At this point, most of the time I can only narrow down the vocalist to finch, sparrow, thrush, or some other general category. Lately I am relearning the reedy note of the white-throated sparrow, as they are again prowling in my rhododendrons.

Yesterday I was out in the woods near Kimpton Brook when I heard a bird actually singing. It was a frail, quiet song that filtered down from the deciduous canopy. I couldn’t find the singer for the life of me, but decided it was a finch of some kind, based on the tonality.

In 1936 Sergei Prokofiev created “Peter and the Wolf” to teach children the tonalities of the various instruments in an orchestra. This kind of cultural training embarrassed me as a child, and I avoided giving it my attention when it was forced on me in school. It wasn’t until I was in college that I met people whose parents played this record for them at home and I had been listening to bird songs for several years that I realized the value of it.

Most songbirds sound like some sort of wind instrument, but of course other birds resemble percussion (grouse drumming, the odd call of the bittern) or brass (the nattering of waterfowl). Surprisingly few sound like string instruments, which are said to mimic the human voice (cello, especially).

The species we hear most often around our cabin is the barred owl (Strix varia), which sounds to me like the bassoon, perhaps even the double or contrabassoon, a deeply resonant double-reed wind instrument. We can sometimes hear at least three calling to (or at) each other across acres of forest. Their “who cooks for you” refrain is surprisingly low on the scale for a bird that is only the size of a crow (yet another crow-sized bird!).

A year ago, I wrote about a “mystery owl” that we hear only occasionally. It makes a single hoot in the range of an alto clarinet and does so at intervals of several seconds and is then silent for several minutes before calling again. I suspect it is a long-eared owl (Asio otus), but these are quite uncommon in the Northeast, so I withhold any final judgment until I manage to lay eyes on it. This is a difficult task in the case

of the long-eared owl, which is very shy and is famous for holding quite still against the trunk of a tree when you approach one. They are also said to be gregarious, but we have never thought there was more than one calling in our vicinity.

I haven’t seen a great horned owl (Bubo virginianus) in over 40 years. A pair nested in a tract of woodland adjacent to my undergraduate college’s campus. (Coincidentally, there was a bar in town called The Hoot Owl.) I remember being fascinated by the fact that they nested in late winter and that they seemed to eat almost anything. We found pellets they had coughed up, and as part of an exercise for a mammalogy class, tried to name their various prey by identifying the tiny bones. Great horned owls eat all manner of rodents, not just mice, but also squirrels and even woodchucks. They eat other birds as well, sometimes developing a taste for domestic fowl that can be very destructive. T. Gilbert Pearson reported one bird who was so successful that it stopped eating the flesh and consumed only the brains of its kills.

A couple of months ago we went up onto the slopes of Philbrick Hill, overlooking Pleasant Lake in New London, earlier in the day than we usually do. I was surprised to hear a great horned owl calling. It had been many years since I had heard one, but their low, soft stuttering hoot is distinctive to the point of being iconic. It is lower on the scale than the hoot of the long-eared owl, but higher than rhythmic chant of the smaller barred, perhaps in the range of the bass clarinet.

I wondered why we had never heard one down at the base of Jones Hill, where we live. The great horned owl prefers open woodlands that include clearings. The Langenau Forest, where we heard it, has a broad open space around a man-made pond and also some logged-over areas overlooking the lake. But we have old pastures around our cabin that would be suitable. However, in looking to birdsoftheworld.org for an answer, I discovered that B. virginianus does not usually tolerate other owl species within its territory. One study of screech owls in particular found that they were very rarely found within great horned owl territories. Great horned owls not only will not tolerate members of their own species within their territories, but often kill the interlopers. This bird is even known to kill and eat its own nestlings and fledglings during periods of prey shortage. It is no wonder it is called the “tiger of the air.”

Given its ferociousness, I am rather happy it lives a couple of miles away up the hill. I rather like our barred owls, which sometimes hunt during the day, and help keep the chipmunk population down. And I’d also like to see the long-eared owl someday, alive.

Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and writes in Wilmot. An essay collection called Of a Feather is available at amazon.com.