Amazing facts about the beautiful Great Horned Owl – They don’t have horns – The two things sticking up from the Great Horned owls head are tufts of feathers called Plumicorns. They are not horns or ears.
Their ears are different from each other – Owls hear exceptionally well because one ear is positioned higher on the skull. The higher ear is so the owl can hear noises from above. The lower ear is for hearing noises below. This is called asynchronous hearing.
Their Faces help their hearing – On the faces of Great Horned owls and most other owls there are very short feather in a rounded pattern that form a facial disk. This facial dish acts like a satellite dish, receiving sounds and funneling them to the ears, which are hidden beneath feathers on the sides of the skull.
Those amazing eyes – Other than blinking they cannot move their eyes. Owl’s eyes are fixed forward, so when an Owl wants to see something off to the side it must turn its whole head in that direction. An owl has fourteen very flexible neck bones. Because of this they can turn their head two hundred and seventy degrees in either direction which is almost a full circle. In comparison, humans have seven neck bones.
Owls are also color blind. They see everything in shades of black and white.
They see better at night. At night Great Horned owls can see approximately one hundred times better then people can.
They eat anything – Even though the Great Horned owls favorite foods are rodents and rabbits they have been known to eat scorpions and rattlesnakes. Another favorite food is skunk. They are not bothered by the skunk’s odor because owls don’t have a sense of smell. Great Horned owls can and do bring down prey animals that weight three times more than they do. The North American Great Horned owl weighs about two and a half pounds.
They can sometimes swallow their prey whole and later regurgitate pellets composed of bone, fur and the other unwanted parts of their meal.
They fly silently – Great Horned owls, like most owls can fly silently because the ends of their flight feathers don’t have barbules (the tiny hooks that most all other bird feathers have), When birds are flying, the barbules rubbing together is what makes noise.
Size – Females are always bigger, usually about twenty percent larger than the males.
One of the biggest owls in the world the Great Horned owl can grow up to twenty seven inches long and it’s wingspan is about sixty inches which is twice the length of the owls height. To better understand what a wingspan of sixty inches means, an average woman’s height is sixty four and a half inches.
Flight – The Great Horned owl can fly up to forty miles per hour. That is not really fast when you consider that Golden Eagles can fly twice that fast.
Age – Great Horned owls can live up to thirty years
Range – They are found in every American state except Hawaii. They are all through Mexico and South America, except for the Amazon because the vegetation is too dense for the birds to fly.
Great Horned owls usually live and hunt within a one square mile territory.
