More on owls

I found a really cool picture of a barred owl at a really cool blog.

http://discriminations.us

It reminded me of my previous post, and my unfinished interpretation of the owl fight.

I have little to go on but symbology and the calls made by these two owls. Owls fighting may mean a lot of things (competing schools of wisdom or philosophy, for example), but this definitely seemed like a fight to me, because the competing calls were punctuated by loud, recurrent thwacking noises which I'd never heard in my yard before. Like a slow woodpecker, or someone beating on a tree limb with a stick. The noises grew in length and intensity.

I found one web site which, while denying that owls fight ("Owls seldom fight physically, but they raise a vocal ruckus at common territorial boundaries. A Barred Owl pair will defend up to 640 acres--a square mile of territory--needed to produce enough prey for two adults and their nestlings.") contrasted the calls of these two species, the Barn and Barred owls:

Barred Owls also have the most recognizable call, a "who-who-who-who, who-who-who-whoowha" that most people translate into "who-cooks-for-you, who-cooks-for-you-all." Barred Owls are especially vocal during courtship when, in the words of Allen Eckert (The Owls of North America, Weathervane Books), there are "specialized calls made with relative infrequency which virtually defy written description. Some are coarse, guttural, and, to human ears, almost uncouth in character. Others are much like the fierce, hair-raising shrieks of mating alley cats. There are deep chucklings, harsh laughing sounds, maniacal gibberings and gabblings, disconsolate mutterings, howls, and yells. Occasionally there will even be a decidedly disconcerting humanlike scream of pure agony." Such vivid description explains why my friend Russ Rogers Jr. barely slept for the three months it took a Barred Owl pair in his Fort Mill backyard to court and then raise offspring. Barred Owls are most common in wooded bottomlands and swamps.

Common Barn-Owl
Common Barn-Owls (Tyto alba) are the most urbanized Carolina owls. Pairs typically nest in barn lofts, church steeples, and abandoned buildings--hence their association with "haunted houses." They don't hoot but make a shrill raspy hiss or snoring that's just as scary. Barn-Owls, with long legs, heart-shaped faces, white breasts, and tan backs, look very different from our other owls and are in a separate family, the Tytonidae; the rest of the species are in Family Strigidae, the so-called "typical owls."

In terms of sheer intensity, the Barn Owl's shrieks won the argument. But not only do I hate to be anthropomorphic, it is also unfair to pronounce a "winner" based on loudness or weirdness.

My Morse code background (15 words per minute, which isn't that great, but would rate me as "fair") makes the anthropomorph in me regard the Barred Owl as the better talker (his cry spells "E-A-E-A-T"). But the Barn Owl sounds like an encrypted digital stream (possibly more high tech).

This is getting ridiculous, so I am going to take a break.