A friend tried to email an iPhone pic of the Barred Owl snoozing on a branch right off his deck, but the photo didn't come through. Regardless, this is my favorite local owl.
While we usually think of the Barred Owl as a species of the lowlands, and the Great Horned as the similar nighttime predator of the uplands (mice and rabbits get no rest in this world), the Barred can be a regular forest bird. A couple of weeks ago, I heard one every early morning in Georgia in the piney woodland.
We have had a pair nesting in a thick Hemlock grove on a rocky hillside above a flood plain at the Farm for many years. They use an old crow or hawk nest, not a nest hole.
The thing with owls is that it is great fun to see them, but even more fun and weird to hear them. If you are listing birds, hearing is as good as seeing.
Speaking of owls, no pair of Screech Owls have chosen my $45 Screech Owl nest box, and I am disappointed because it is perfectly situated. And at the same time I have seen them use Wood Duck boxes on tiny islands in the middle of ponds, which seems stupid and almost guaranteed to drown the chicks.
About Barred Owl.
Crazy thing about Barred Owl: The experts want to kill thousands of them in the Pacific Northwest because they are "competing" with Spotted Owl. That is how some environmentalists think: Destroy the village to save it. It's like they want to kill immigrants with a slightly different color. Fact is, the Spotted is a west coast variant of the Barred. They interbreed, thus different races, same species.
I am all in favor of trying to destroy invasive species which threaten a stable, precious ecosystem (eg Burmese Python in Everglades, or Australian Pine in Florida and the Bahamas. "Invasive" usually means introduced by man, not critters and plants moving on their own.
I can think of one bird species that moved to North America: The Cattle Egret, blown over to the New World by hurricanes from Africa. They found their niche and fit right in.
Some man-introduced plants never become invasive in the sense of dominating an existing ecosystem. I am thinking of things like the Norway Maple which shades many urban streets, the Norway Spruce, - and the apple. Nobody complains about the occasional wild apple "escape" growing in a brushy forest edge. Some new species dominate, some just fit in unobtrusively and harmlessly.
Killing a Barred Owl is a sin unless you intend to dine on it.
