A Tale of Two Kitties

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Or some such. We know for certain only that a great horned owl swooped out of the evening sky, grabbed Tom, flapped away, then—20 or 30 feet high—dropped the struggling cat and disappeared.

Not long after, just across the valley from the Tom attack, the cat-loving owl (or one of his or her kin) struck again, taking another light-colored outdoor tabby. This time there were no witnesses, but the deep puncture wounds on the victim's head and chest, together with other bits of circumstantial evidence, seemed to spell great horned owl: The attack came after dark (fairly ruling out an eagle as the predator), and the attacker again dropped the goods when they began fighting back—apparently from no low altitude, since the cat's back was broken most terminally.

Though I admire and enjoy the company of birds, especially the big hunters, the raptors, I'm not what you'd call a full-fledged birder—more of a mammal man, actually. But those two owl-and-pussycat incidents, coming close together and near home as they did, piqued my curiosity and prompted me to launch an investigation of this shadowy eagle of the night, the great horned owl.

Anyone seriously interested in gaining the wisdom of the owl should begin at the beginning—with Hawks, Owls and Wildlife (Dover Publications, 1969), by the Craig-head brothers (yes, John and Frank of grizzly bear research fame). This scholarly work—a surprisingly good read—details the Craigheads' exhaustive field studies of owls and other birds of prey throughout the 1940s. The research was conducted primarily in the brothers' boyhood home of Superior Township, Michigan, but also in their later stamping grounds around Teton National Park, Wyoming. The Craigheads' work was the first in-depth field study of raptors, and remains one of the most extensive and revealing ever undertaken.

So what did the brothers learn? Well, they discovered that the great horned owl's home territory averages just under six square miles; that, however, the raptor's winter range encompasses only a portion of its home range; that the big bird is essentially nonmigratory; that the horned owl can and does hunt both day and night; that it's something of a bully who lords it over all other raptors in

its territory; that it nests earlier than any other bird in North America; that great homed owls don't build their own nests, but appropriate those built the previous season by other large birds, notably hawks and crows; that those nests which the big horny finds but doesn't adopt, it often destroys; that great homed owls prey on other raptors, both young and adults, especially at night when the day-hunters are snoozing; that horned owls play a major role in limiting crow populations; that, conversely, swarms of crows can pose a serious threat to nesting great horned owls and their chicks; that, in the Craigheads' study area, the typical mated pair of horned owls produced an average of three eggs but only 1.1 surviving chicks per year; that horned owlets leave their parents' territory to establish their own as soon as they're able to fend for themselves; and so on.
Interesting stuff, all.
Of course, in the three-plus decades since the Craigheads' pioneering studies were completed, other researchers have increased our knowledge of the horned owl tremendously. The high points of this information are now available to the amateur naturalist (according to my reckoning, that includes anyone who's interested in the mysteries of

nature) in the pages of such compressed but surprisingly comprehensive reference works as Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to the Birds and A Field Guide to Western Birds.

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