What an Owl Knows by Jennifer Ackerman

Author:Jennifer Ackerman [Ackerman, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Or to Go . . .

When it comes to owls, there’s probably nothing more astounding than seeing hundreds roosting collectively in a single place. But if there is, it’s the thought of multitudes of owls flying silently above our heads through the night sky.

It was once believed that owls were mostly sedentary, remaining more or less in the same place all their lives. That’s true for some species—the Little Owl, Barred Owl, and Northern Spotted Owl. But other species migrate: they move around for the same reasons other migratory birds do, to find food. But when it comes to the details, owls are hard to pigeonhole. They seem to defy tidy categories: This species is a migrant. That one is nomadic. This one is “irruptive,” meaning the bird periodically migrates in unusually large numbers from its breeding grounds, sometimes—but not always—because of a scarcity of prey. With owls, it’s more subtle and nuanced.

“These birds have been around for millions of years,” says David Johnson, “so we might expect them to have evolved many ways for dealing with food limitations.” Their strategies vary wildly between sexes, among age groups, and under different environmental conditions. What applies to one species does not necessarily apply to another. Some species, such as the Long-eared Owl, Short-eared Owl, and Burrowing Owl, are seasonally migratory. So is the Eurasian Scops Owl, which makes long migrations from Europe to wintering grounds south of the Sahara. Even within a single species, there can be tremendous variation. Snowy Owls, for instance, use every migratory strategy in the book.

“We’re far behind in our understanding of the migratory patterns of owls versus other birds,” says Scott Weidensaul, an expert on bird migration, in part because they’re nocturnal and just so much harder to study.

Thanks to the efforts of a flock of dedicated researchers, two species—one tiny and elusive, the other huge and showy—are starting to yield some of the secrets of their surreptitious journeys and, in the process, illuminating how owls move and why.

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