Eerie screams haunt the cemetery. Demonic laughter threads through the pines. Swamps throb with shrieks and catcalls. And from the local woods, the question repeats over and over, as if uttered by a hungry ghost: Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?
These nighttime voices seem to belong to banshees, demons, maniacs. But they belong to creatures stranger still: night-flying birds with oddly flattened faces, with ears asymmetrically arranged with the right higher than the left, and with eyes so huge that if ours occupied so vast a proportion of our face, our eyes would be as big as oranges. The voices belong to owls, and on February nights, their calls float through the still, cold air like spirits.
“This is definitely the time of year to listen for owls,” insists Harris Center conservation educator Janet Altobell. This is the time of year she prowls for owls with second- and third-graders and their families, listening in the local woods in the night.
“Right now there’s a whole lot of hooting going on,” agrees Wayne Petersen, Massachusetts Audubon ornithologist. In fact, while you may hear the voices of owls any time during the year, late February and early March offer the best chances to catch the duets of two of the most vocal owls in the United States, the great horned and the barred. Although both species possess a varied repertoire, ranging from hisses to cackles, they’re best known for those owl classics: the great horned’s deep, mellow who-hoo-ho-o-o and the barred owl’s Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all? The calls may carry for a mile.
What are these owls really saying? People have been guessing at that for centuries. Thirteenth-century Persians thought the owls were dispensing wisdom. (But hey, they also thought one out of two owl eggs was a hair tonic, and the other egg was a depilatory.) Many other cultures assumed owls foretold doom. (Some folks in Cajun country down in Louisiana still believe hoot owls announce a coming death, which might be warded off by getting up and turning a left shoe upside down. If that doesn’t work, it’s said that turning a left pocket inside out might do the trick.)
No one has completely decoded owls’ cackles, shrieks, and hoots. But this time of year, in the most frequently heard vocalizations, owls are saying about the same stuff you find on Valentines. These young owls are selecting mates, and established owl couples —they pair for life—are renewing vows. One owl calls, its mate answers. The larger, more dominant female’s voice is usually the louder.
Great horneds are just about to lay their eggs, often in the big abandoned stick nest of a red-tailed hawk in a white pine. Barred owls are getting ready to do so later in March and on into April. As part of their courtship, couples are announcing their territories, lands they may hold for eight years or more. And that is why, if you hoot at owls, they will often answer you, and frequently fly in for a closer look. (And that’s why you shouldn’t overdo your hoots. Too many foreign hoots could cause an owl to vacate its territory or to attack you.)
The chance to hear an owl call is a magical opportunity. “It’s incredible how many people you can get at three in the morning to go out in the freezing cold to go owling,” says Petersen. It’s enough to inspire even little kids to stay quiet. When Altobell leads kids on nighttime owl prowls in nearby forests, she says “the noisiest thing about it is the nylon snowsuits rubbing together!”
Any time after dark may yield owl calls, but the best time to go, insists Petersen, is right before first light. Pick a windless night—the owls are more active then, and you will hear better too.
Although most owl species prefer dense woods, any place with lots of big, old trees could harbor an owl—parks, woods, shady backyards, cemeteries. If you’re owling for great horneds, visit at night the sorts of places you’d see red-tailed hawks during the day: broken terrain, pine woods at the edge of a field. Barred owls (who may hoot as late as 7:00 A.M.) prefer hemlock forests and maple swamps.
Although screech owls don’t nest till spring, you’re likely to hear them, too, on your midwinter owling expedition. On a good night, says Petersen, you may hear fifteen or twenty screech owls offering up quavering whistles, descending whinnies or hollow, monotonous calls. In evergreen forests, you may also hear the voice of the tiny saw-whet owl, uttering the skreigh-aw for which it is named, or a mechanical tooting call, an upward, slurred whistle, or the sound of a squeaky gate.
Be sure to bring a flashlight when you go owling. If you’re quiet, owls don’t mind the light. A full moon adds to the magic but isn’t really necessary to find owls. Their huge eyes—not spherical like ours but tubular, like binoculars—can gather enough light to hunt on even pitch-black nights. (Their odd eyes, in fact, cannot move in their sockets. But no matter: an owl can twist its neck 270 degrees, and snap it around so fast its stare seems continuous.) And what owls can’t see, they can hear. Asymmetrically placed ears and round, flat faces help gather and pinpoint the faintest mouse squeak, a job owls accomplish with much acrobatic head-bobbing and bodyrocking. The prey seldom knows what hit it. With wingbeats muffled by its ruffled-edged feathers, the owl floats through the sky, silent as a moth.
Owls’ diets can be quite eclectic. Great horneds have been known to take prey as prickly as porcupines and as powerful as golden eagles. New Hampshire Fish and Game biologist Ted Walski says that during particularly snowy winters, with voles and mice hidden beneath the ice crust, he’s found wild turkeys headless in the woods—and he thinks owls might be the culprits. (Owls often eat the head of the prey first.) Owls even eat other owls. A few years back, Diane De Luca, New Hampshire Audubon senior biologist/ornithologist, used to hear the calls of both a barred and a great horned owl around her yard in Deering, New Hampshire. Then one day she found a pile of brown barred owl feathers. A few feet away, beneath the red oak by the road where the great horned liked to sit, she found a neat five-inch-long pellet—a compact bundle of indigestible fur, bones, feet, and insect parts the owl brings up and spits out after the meal is digested. She didn’t actually see what happened, she said, “but the story was pretty clear.”