Monday, December 28, 2009

Great Horned Owl

We have a tall Pine tree just across the street from our home and at the top is a nest originally built by Red Tailed Hawks. The first year the young pair built, it blew out during a windstorm. The second year, they'd figured out the engineering and it stayed.
For two years the hawks nested and raised their young but the third year, in March, before they'd even begun to think of nesting, a Great Horned Owl pair moved in.

Great Horned Owls do a great deal of communicating... all night long while they were hunting you could hear the pair calling to each other.
I expected to hear the babies once they were born but not a sound came from the nest.

We weren't even sure they had successfully hatched until their fluffy white heads popped up.

Then one very early morning while walking my dog, I looked up to see a baby owl wobbling on the phone line above my head. He was as curious of me as I was of him and we kept each other company for quite a while.

From then on, I watched for them but it was only a matter of days before momma had convinced them to fly further and further away.

This year neither hawk nor owl have nested and I really miss them.

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