William H. Funk
In the Forests of the Night: The Great Horned Owl
Around 8:00 on the night of August 21, 1955, the Sutton farm near the hamlet of Kelly, Kentucky, was visited by a mysterious and terrifying phenomenon. An hour after a brilliant streak of light had disappeared behind the brooding tree line surrounding the farmhouse, the family dog alerted Elmer “Lucky” Sutton and a visiting friend to strange goings-on in the backyard.Armed with a shotgun and a .22 rifle, the two men slipped quietly outside to confront what was later described as a misshapen dwarf enveloped in “a greenish silver glow” lurking high on a tree limb, a being possessed of an outsized head, “long arms” and “pointed ears.” Menacing yellow eyes glared down at them through the gloom. The two men opened fire, naturally, spraying the general vicinity with panicked bursts of birdshot and bullets, actions they said caused the apparition to “float” down to the ground, before they fled back into the house.
For the next three hours the family was besieged by a ruthless and unknowable presence. At one point an inhuman face thrust itself before a kitchen window and was fired upon. Poking his head outside the back door to reconnoiter, another friend who had been at the house that evening had his scalp torn open by one of the creatures that had positioned itself on the roof. The victim, named Billy Ray Taylor, later recalled that the beast had long “spindly” legs as well as fearsome claws. This first physical assault initiated a full-fledged panic and caused the eleven people within the farmhouse—including eight full-grown adults—to pile themselves into several automobiles and hightail it eight miles south to the Hopkinsville police department. Subsequent investigation by city, county and state officials (later joined, allegedly, by agents of the United States Air Force) failed to provide any evidence of the night’s encounter, other than the hole in the kitchen window screen produced by a jittery shotgun blast.
What malign presence was behind this visitation? Meteor activity had been widely reported over the region that night, which might explain the “UFO,” but what about the yellow-eyed monster that trapped an entire extended family of taxpayers in their home for three solid hours? Was it cabin fever? Bad whiskey? Mass hysteria? Or perhaps it was something even stranger than the fictional aliens the Sutton family still swears by, creatures every bit as eerie, formidable and bizarre as they were described, but beings decidedly of this planet.
While we will never know exactly what went on that weird moonlit night, it seems probable that the Sutton’s uncanny visitors were specimens of Bubo virginianus, the great horned owl, known as the “flying tiger” for its single-minded savagery when hunting. Not even eagles, not even the peregrine falcon or northern goshawk, can match the horned owl’s pitiless devotion to the slaughter of such a wide variety of prey. Contributing to its diverse larder is the fact that horned owls are sexually dimorphous, with females often significantly larger than their mates. Males average a little over three pounds, while females can weigh up to five pounds. This trait provides the great horned with a wide array of prey species from which a pair may select on any given night. And when a horned owl goes in for the kill, it keeps fighting until either it or its quarry is dead. There is no retreat.
Standing two feet tall and boasting a five-foot wingspan, the great horned owl is a common bird throughout its North American range, from the Aleutian Islands to Newfoundland and south to Nicaragua. The species is absent from the Isthmus of Panama and the Amazon basin but is widely distributed in Venezuela, Bolivia, the Peruvian Andes, and throughout central South America. This hemispheric distribution has resulted in the evolution of many different morphs or subspecies distinguished by variant plumages based on latitude and microclimate. While there is a great deal of dissimilarity among even local populations, horned owls in the southern United States generally display a rustier coloration than their gray northern cousins.
The great horned owl’s feathers are richly patterned in variations of maple, black and pale slate, with a buff undercoat barred with heavy streaks of chocolate. A clean white ruff, typically obscured, lies below the throat and is startlingly bared when the bird calls or makes a threat display. This cryptic coloration makes for excellent camouflage when the owl naps in the afternoons, perched on a tree limb near the trunk and elongating its body to blend into the bark. Tufted “horns” (plumicorns) used for both camouflage and non-vocal communications accentuate the deception. While regurgitated pellets of indigestible hair, teeth and toenails on the forest floor may give away their proximity, hunters and hikers routinely pass unknowingly beneath dozing owls, whose ability to mold their feather conformation and body shape to blend into their environment is without parallel among American birds.
All adult great horned owls have outsize eyes with radiant golden irises, jammed with rods to facilitate a night vision 100 times greater than our own. The eyes also deliver ten times sharper general vision than ours, they are fully the size of an adult human’s. In fact the great horned owl’s eyes are so large that they are immobile within their sockets, a physiological necessity which gave rise to the bird’s fourteen neck vertebrae (twice that of other birds) and 270˚ head rotation. A semi-transparent nictating membrane is used as a third eyelid to regularly clean the lenses and provide protection just before an attack. The pupils are capable of independent dilation, and the great horned owl, like many raptors, can stare unfazed into the noonday sun.
Supernal as is the horned owl’s vision, its hearing is if anything even more astonishing. As with most owls, the great horned’s eyes are set within concave partial facial dishes that channel the faintest vibration directly to the ears. As a crepuscular (dusk and dawn) specialist, the horned owl has no need for the full facial dish of the smaller barn owl, a ghostly creature able to track and kill prey in laboratory-induced total darkness. The great horned may hunt throughout the night, especially when feeding young, but it is most active in the twilight hours and thus relies upon a combination of both sight and hearing.
No sound escapes its constantly weaving, bobbing, spinning head, which acts as a radar dish funneling sound waves to the great ear canals oriented at different heights on the owl’s skull to aid in sound triangulation. High-frequency emissions, higher even than the owl’s own tonal range (almost all other animals hear best within their own tonal ranges), and far beyond the human register, are easily discerned and assist the hunter in locating prey by its occasional squeaks or the patter of nervous feet on dry leaves.
Another adaptation to nighttime hunting is the great horned’s low wing loading, a ratio of slight body weight to vast wing size which makes gliding all the more silent. The wings of a horned owl are both wide and long, like an eagle’s, thus allowing for effortless, buoyant flight as well as an incredibly powerful lifting capacity: the great horned owl can carry off prey three times its own weight. The flight feathers are specially modified as well, the windward edges endowed with a serrated fringe of down that acts to disrupt airflow over the wings, muting the whistle that accompanies the flight of birds like ducks and doves. Gliding down like a phantom upon unsuspecting prey, the horned owl is nearly invincible in its native element.
This astounding package of bodily traits meant to maximize killing success sounds like the ultimate evolution of a night-flying hawk, but the great horned, like all owls, is actually descended from the late Cretaceous divergence of Orders Strigiformes (owls) and Caprimulgiformes (nightjars such as whippoorwills). In a marvelous instance of convergent evolution, the hooked bills, lethal talons, piercing eyesight and flying skills of the hawk family have been mirrored in these relatives of the gape-mouthed goatsuckers. How? Both hawks and owls intake protein in the same violent manner, and this particular ensemble of claws and feathers has proven itself over slow eons as the most efficient means of collecting vertebrate prey. So for both diurnal and nocturnal raptors, to reverse Freud’s famous dictum, destiny is anatomy.
Possessed of uncanny sight and hearing, enormously powerful, relentless, insatiable, and utterly without fear, the great horned owl exerts dominion over all other creatures of the American night. While rabbits are generally preferred, prey species run the taxonomic scale: crayfish, snakes, shrews, hares, squirrels, sandpipers, bats, rats, mice, fish, hawks, owls, pigeons, possums, herons, groundhogs, weasels, woodpeckers, geese, crows, porcupines, skunks, housecats—in short, anything the owl can physically overcome. Like accipiters (forest hawks such as the Cooper’s and sharp-shinned), great horned owls hunt by perching on limbs and waiting in silence for their extraordinary senses to betray the presence of nearby prey. Once detected by a healthy adult, the victim stands little chance of escape.
From mice to groundhogs, the great horned owl’s largely mammalian prey is seized near the base of the skull by zygodactylic feet (like a woodpecker’s: two toes in front, two opposing toes in back). The toes are fully feathered to keep the owl’s principal weaponry warm and available in all weather conditions, and are capable of exerting an incredible 500 pounds of pressure per square inch, easily enough to break a man’s arm if the owl’s grip could encircle it. This terrible strength is leveraged to drive the four curved talons deep into the prey’s vital organs; if the victim continues to struggle, the owl will withdrawn and reapply its talons in another location, searching for the sweet spot of heart or lungs.
Death results from organ failure, blood loss or severe internal injuries occasioned by the owl’s crushing grip. For large prey such as skunks and housecats the owl will bring its powerful beak into play, immobilizing the quarry as best it can while digging through the neck muscles to the spinal cord. During these battles, which can last for a half hour or more, the owl becomes possessed of a maniacal rage, with human observers able to stand unheeded a few feet away from the combatants.
Like many raptors (Latin nomenclature for “one who seizes by force”), horned owls employ what is best described as fury when subduing large prey, maximizing the damage they inflict so as to ensure a quick kill and little or no dangerous resistance. The great horned owl is, after all, only a bird, and birds are delicate, hollow-boned creatures, half air themselves, and cannot withstand the concussive blows that solid-boned mammals may shrug off. The legendary ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Birds of Prey (1937), recorded the great horned’s killing rage:
“A few feet in front of me was a large Horned Owl in a sort of sitting posture. His back and head were against an old log. His feet were thrust forward, and firmly grasped a full-grown skunk. One foot had hold of the skunk’s head and the other clutched it tightly by the middle of the back. The animal seemed to be nearly dead, but still had strength enough to leap occasionally into the air in its endeavors to shake off its captor. During the struggle, the Owl’s eyes would fairly blaze, and he would snap his beak with a noise like the clapping of your hands.”
Yet this killing machine, ferocious without peer, is also a devoted parent; in fact much of the hunting by a mated pair is done for that most elemental and noble of motives—perpetuation of the species. Horned owls are ferociously protective of their offspring, and that murderous strength unsheathed in combat is easily turned on interlopers who dare to approach an occupied nest. Bent recollects one incautious egg collector’s description of a typical two-pronged attack:
“Swiftly the old bird came straight as an arrow from behind and drove her sharp claws into my side, causing a deep dull pain and unnerving me, and no sooner had she done this than the other attacked from the front and sank his talons deep in my right arm causing blood to flow freely, and a third attack and my shirtsleeve was torn to shreds for they had struck me a third terrible blow on my right arm tearing three long, deep gashes, four inches long; also one claw went through the sinew of my arm, which about paralyzed the whole arm.”
The horned owl’s drive to satisfy the hunger of its young is such that it kills more, sometimes much more, than even gluttonous owlets can eat. Young great horned owls are fierce competitors for meat and will sometimes cannibalize one another when provender is insufficient, but their parents’ hunting prowess is such that in most years this is rarely a concern. According to Bent, a single nest contained “a mouse, a young muskrat, two eels, four bullheads [catfish of the genus Ameiurus], a woodcock, four ruffed grouse, one rabbit, and eleven rats. The food taken out of the nest weighed almost eighteen pounds.”
Great horned owls mate for life but live separately for about a quarter of each year. After spending the fall and early winter hunting apart from one another a mated pair is eager to renew their bond, with hooting courtship serenades beginning in the frigid depths of January, earlier than any other North American avian species. The courtship ritual is purposefully seductive and even touching: after gentle hooting has lured her within range, the male softly approaches the larger female, strokes her with his bill, lowers his wings and makes a series of solemn bows before renewing his tender caresses.
Eventually the pair flies off together to mate and find a home to rear their young, usually the abandoned nest of a hawk, crow, heron or squirrel situated 30-70 feet above the ground. If they are unable to find a suitable empty nest before the female is ready to lay eggs, the pair will simply appropriate an occupied one, driving away or killing the residents. Attacked during the night when they are at their most vulnerable, even red-tailed hawks are unable to withstand the great horned owl.
One to five white and nearly spherical eggs are laid before the snow melts, with the male providing his spouse abundant prey while she broods the young. The owlets, hatched over time and thus of differing ages and sizes, are incubated by both parents for 25-30 days, the young flying about two and half months after hatching. The fledgling owlets, having leapt from their reeking nest in the first of many future displays of raw nerve, spend ten days to two weeks on the ground while their flight muscles gain sufficient strength for liftoff. During this period their devotedly protective parents feed and guard them, with fearsome belligerence.
By the time they are ten weeks old the young owls are ready to fly, often hunting together as they learn, by trial and error, how to do what horned owls do best. During their weaning they are fed supplemental rations by their parents, but by October the young are on their own as the adults expel them from their territory, separate themselves and take up solitary existences until the winter courtship comes around once more.
As a young great horned owl ages it necessarily becomes a more proficient hunter. Those who fail to learn or are crippled in battle during the educational phase simply disappear.
A few years ago, having finally talked my girlfriend at the time into an overnight trip into the outdoors, we were comfortably ensconced at the campground of Pilot Mountain State Park in North Carolina. It was late November (an initial source of friction), and we were hunkered down by the side of the fading campfire, preparing to turn in, when turning to say something to me she suddenly looked wildly over my shoulder and gave a shriek. I whirled around but saw nothing. “Someone was in that tree,” she whispered, seizing my arm. “I saw his eyes in the firelight, looking right down at us!” Assurances of safety were useless. Nothing would do but that I make a dutiful patrol around the perimeter with my flashlight, my mind on other things, and scan the star-rimmed pines for arboreal villains. Finally she calmed down enough for us to retire, still insisting she’d seen someone staring at her with great yellow eyes from midway up the pitch pine on the edge of our campsite.
Hours later I was jolted from sleep by the screaming of a child far out in the woods. It went on, horribly, for perhaps ten seconds, when it abruptly ended. Thankfully my companion had remained asleep—this would have been the last straw, occasioning a panicked midnight retreat back to Raleigh. I’d tried to tell her what our visitor had likely been, and the dying rabbit I’d just heard, now being carried off to another world, was unmistakable confirmation. The great horned owl she had seen had simply been investigating these latest visitors to its kingdom, and, having satisfied its burning curiosity, without a sound had vanished back into the woods, where it had other business.
William H. Funk holds both a Juris Doctor and a Master’s Degree in Environmental Policy from Vermont Law & Graduate School, one of the country’s top environmental law facilities. His areas of journalistic expertise include endangered species and habitat preservation, wildlife crime, marine issues, history, public lands management, climate change, animal cruelty issues, wetlands mitigation, land use, environmental law, sustainability, wilderness subjects, traditional cultures, rural living and Appalachian culture. He is particularly interested in journalistic projects that involve some of the weightiest topics of our time: rewilding, the African poaching crisis, the Anthropocene and the Sixth Extinction. William has worked with numerous conservation NGOs and both federal and state environmental agencies. He is a licensed attorney specializing in environmental law, as well as a skilled and eager naturalist.
William’s work has appeared in many publications including: Ensia, Vice, Yale Environment360, Aeon, Bay Journal, Sierra, Mongabay, Discover, Humanities, The Revelator, Cosmos, Bird Watcher’s Digest, FuturePerfect, The Southern Quarterly, Grit, The Utne Reader, African Wildlife News, Earth Island Journal, Virginia Wildlife, Wildlife in North Carolina, History Today, Blue Ridge Digest, Virginia Sportsman, Africa Geographic, Virginia Business, and Quest: The Science of Sustainability.
Contact William at williamhfunk@icloud.com or www.williamhfunk3.com.
Recognitions
2023 Patagonia Tools for Grassroots Activists Institute, Lake Tahoe
2018 Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources Post-SEJ Conference Tour of Great Lakes
2018 Travel Fellowship for Society of Environmental Journalists Annual Conference
2018 St. Lawrence River Institute, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources
2018 Excellence in Craft Awards, First and Second Place, Virginia Outdoor Writers Association
2017 Most Read Article on Mongabay, “Namibia’s Low Cost, Sustainable Solution to Seabird Bycatch”
2017 Speaker’s Fellowship for the World Conference of Science Journalism, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing
2017 Journalism Fellow, Society of Wetland Scientists
2017 Freelance Fellowship for Workshop: “Searching for Truth in the Age of Alternative Facts,” Society of Environmental Journalists
2017 Certificate of Excellence in Craft for Conservation Writing, Virginia Outdoor Writers Association and Appalachian Mountain Advocates
2015 McCormick Specialized Reporting Institute: “Covering Water in a Changing World”
2015 Freelance Fellowship for ScienceWriters2015, National Association of Science Writers
2015 Chesapeake Bay Institute, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources
2015 Frank Allen Field Reporting Award, Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources
2014 Rosen Fellowship, Society of Environmental Journalists
2012/2013 Founder and Chair, Staunton Chapter, Virginia Production Alliance
First published in the February 2009 issue of Wildlife in North Carolina magazine and again in the November 2010 issue of Bird Watcher’s Digest
Banner Art:
Image by Amber Dawn, Pixabay, 2020
