Long-eared Owl - You Don't See Me!

Long-eared Owls aren’t rare, and they don’t live in remote locations. But their plumage and habits make them incredibly elusive. The mixture of warm browns and cool, bark-like grays lends the bird an astonishingly branch-like appearance. When potential predators approach, the birds close their orange eyes and stretch their bodies so that even the most practiced human eye has a hard time spotting them.

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Long-eared Owl - You Don’t See Me!

Written by Rick Wright

This is BirdNote!
[Long-eared Owl, ML 49057]
Some birds are rare. Some birds are shy. Some birds dwell in remote, utterly inaccessible forests and swamps and deserts.
Not the Long-eared Owl.
Though it’s hard to estimate the populations of nocturnal birds, there may be as many as five million Long-eared Owls in the world. They aren’t particularly shy, and in many places they breed and winter right in towns and cities.
[Long-eared Owl, ML 49057]
And yet, even by owl standards, the Long-eared Owl is a rarely seen bird. Even if you’re constantly on the lookout for this handsome mid-sized owl, it’s a red-letter day when you actually get to see one.
It’s not a question of rarity, shyness, or inaccessibility. It’s a combination of plumage and habits that makes the Long-eared such a find. The mixture of warm browns and cool, bark-like grays lends the bird an astonishingly branch-like appearance. When people or other potential predators approach, Long-eareds further enhance their invisibility by closing their orange eyes and stretching their bodies as close to the vertical as possible. Even to an extremely practiced human eye, they become nothing more than a jagged stump in the roost tree.
[Long-eared Owl, XC552302]
Sometimes just knowing they’re out there, somewhere, has to be enough.
For BirdNote, I’m Mary McCann.
Today’s show brought to you by the Bobolink Foundation.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Production Manager: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Associate Producer: Ellen Blackstone
Long-eared Owl, ML 49057, provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York, and recorded by Dave Herr. And XC552302 provided by xeno-canto.org, recorded by Jarek Matusiak.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2021 BirdNote February 2021 Narrator: Mary McCann

ID# LEOW-02-2021-02-22 LEOW-02