Several years ago in late February a gentleman called me to tell me he had seen around 200 owls the day before in one small area in the western Ozarks. He said that on one corral fence there were more than thirty in a group!
When you are a grizzled old outdoor veteran like me, you figure you have seen about everything in the outdoors, and I have never seen more than four or five owls of any species together in the woods ever. So, you can figure if I haven’t ever seen something, I won’t believe it ‘til I see it. And folks, ‘I went there and seen it and I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it’.
Near Greenfield, Missouri was a huge group of short-eared owls, a species a little bit like the barred owl in size and appearance, but with small ears sticking up. In habit, they are much different than most of the owls we are accustomed to hearing and seeing in the Ozarks. They have a mean look to them, with ornery-looking bright yellow eyes rather than the brown eyes the barred owl has. And the face is much different, with a pronounced circle of feathers, contrasting white and dark brown, and two little feather patches referred to as “ears”, which are much like the horns on a horned owl. Except the ears on a short-eared owl can usually not be seen, they just barely stick up above the forehead most of the time.
They are a species not so much fond of forests; they do not seem to need a tree. They stick to a more open country like that prairie land along the Missouri Kansas border, with scrub timber and thickets. And they nest on the ground! Now that is something, when you think about how most all owls nest in hollow trees. The barn owl often nests in old buildings of course, and there is an odd little burrowing owl which nests in holes in the ground.
It is interesting to note that an owl can’t build a nest because his beak isn’t made for carrying and assembling nest materials. A burrowing owl doesn’t dig his burrow, and barn owls don’t build a nest at all, they just lay eggs on a barn loft or ledge. Great horned owls and barred owls find a natural hole in a tree and nest there, or sometime use an old hawk nest. But short-eared owls actually nest in the grass on the ground, which they trample down and flatten down, and they actually try to arrange a few sticks in a situation which really doesn’t resemble a nest. Knowing that other owls do not carry sticks, that’s something I’d like to see.
On this little flattened grass “nest” they will lay anywhere from 3 or 4 to 7 or 8 eggs, depending on the whim of the female owl I suppose. They lay their eggs in May or early June, and the eggs aren’t much more than an inch wide, about an inch and half long. That is a very small egg for a bird that eventually will mature at a size of 14 to 16 inches tall and weigh about a pound. Most owls and predatory birds, known as raptors, are nesting now, sitting on or laying eggs in late February or early March.
Ornithologists examined the stomach contents of 110 short-eared owls many years back, and found that three-quarters of their diet had been mice or voles of one kind or another, about 10 percent small birds and nearly as many moles and shrews. About 7 percent of the diet appeared to be insects, with the stomach of one owl containing about 30 big grasshoppers. So that tells you they didn’t do that study in the winter! Another odd thing about the short-eared owl is that he is a daytime type of owl, actively hunting during the day more than at night, when most other owls are active.
But why do they bunch up in flocks? Why are so many owls concentrated in such a small area together? Who can explain that? Certainly not me, and up to then I though I knew everything! Obviously these short-eared owls do some kind of a migration, perhaps not very far, but likely from a place where food supplies of small ground mammals had been decimated for some reason or another. It is likely a mass movement of a species looking for food. I don’t see, anywhere in books I have, any naturalists talking about a migration of owls.
Obviously, as I have said so often, no one can know all there is to know about nature. Those of us who spend a great deal of time outdoors see unexplainable things. A modern day outdoorsman or naturalist who tries to learn by the book can know little of the secrets of nature. You have to be there sometimes to see things which perhaps no one has seen before.
If you like to read about the outdoors, see my websites, www.larrydablemont.com
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