hey everyone i live in kitchener ontario and we were walking through the bush today and came across this owl theres a picture below it was amazing but i dont know what kind of owl it is and i got about less then a metre away from it should it have flew off could there be something wrong with it? anyway heres a pic its not the best picture cause all we had was a camera phone but it was the best i could do.
Barred Owl, newly fledged owlet (which is why it didn't fly off).
You were lucky the parents didn't attack you! Parent owls can be quite dangerous in defending their young - they attack completely silently, and go for your eyes.
Resin
Welcome to the forum Whitney!
What a great find; glad you didn't have any problems.
Here is a page on them.
http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/id
Pelle
This message was edited May 4, 2009 7:24 AM
so i have been looking at some pictures of the barred owl as you said and it looks nothing like what i saw. even when i look at pictures of the babies it didnt look like that then i was searching around the internet some more and discovered that the baby great horned owl looks almost exactly like the pic and from what i remember. i dono if its possible or not tho could you give me some imput on that sudjestion?
Wow they do look alike. Lets see what Resin says.
Wow...be really careful then....
How large was it? Hard to judge the size from the photo exactly, but it doesn't look to have the bulk that a Great Horned Owl has - a Great Horned Owlet would still be larger than a crow, nearly as large as a Red-tailed Hawk; a Barred Owlet would be a bit smaller than a crow.
Resin
I was wondering how a definitive ID could be made from that picture as well. In your area, you'd have 3 large owl species, Great Horned, Great Gray and Barred. The pic you posted to me didn't look like it had the haunting hollow black eyes of a Barred. My first thought was Great Horned, but I don't have enough experience to make a good judgement.
My first impression was a Great Horned Owl. I was a little surprised by Resin's Barred Owl identification. So I pulled up my photos of Great Horned Owl chicks. I still believe it is a Great Horned Owl, but rather young to be out of the nest. Judging from my photos I would guess it left the nest 10 days to two weeks younger then the Great Horned Owls chicks, in the nest I photographed. The attached photo is of chicks about the same age as the one in question. The face changed from black to brown as feathers developed with age.
well it was probly about a foot long and it was fairly like bulky thats why at first my first thought to you saying it was a baby barred owl kinda confused me cause i didnt think it would be that big as only a baby but it definatly was bigger then a crow forsure. and another thing that kinda thrrew me off of thinking it was a barred owl was that its beak wasnt yellow it was black. in that picture his head is facing directly behind him like his bum is facing the camera i wish i would have taken more pictures of it maybe this would be alot easyer but i didnt wanna get to close cause i was already only 2 feet away from it. it didnt make a noise it didnt even so much as blink the only time it moves was when my bf kinda wiggled the tree it was sitting on because we couldnt tell if it was alive or dead.
its beak wasnt yellow it was black
