In case you haven’t noticed, we only have 47 more days until spring.
Not that winter 2020 has been horrible, but the hubby heard our favorite February gateway to spring sounds — the hoot of our returning great horned owl. February is mating season for these owls, who have obviously taken to having date night in our tulip poplar.
I particularly like that according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, “Mated pairs are monogamous and defend their territories with vigorous hooting, especially in the winter before egg-laying and in the fall when their young leave the area.”
Of course February is Valentine’s Day, also called mating season, for bald eagles, striped skunks and cottontail rabbits. But I like to imagine that our great horned owl couple, who are known to stay together as a pair from five to 30 years, have chosen Johnson County as their territory year round.
The hooting between the male and female, who has a higher pitched hoot, starts with working together to line a new nest with shreds of bark, twigs, leaves, downy feathers plucked from their own breast or feathers from prey.
Owls are great recyclers since they don’t make their own nests, instead, finding nests that have already been made, normally by birds, and make it their new home.
Once their annual new nest is complete, they begin hooting to make everyone aware of their new home — but also to make sure males stay away. The male calls also help to attract females at the start of their courtship season.
In “Walden,” first published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau shares his experiences living in a cabin for two years near Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts:
“I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized.”
Scott Russell Sanders, distinguished professor of English at Indiana University Bloomington and Hoosier writer, added in his book “The Paradise of Bombs” the following words: “Most of us still don’t recognize that ‘undeveloped nature,’ that nature which dances and unfurls its life without regard to human purposes. We can’t hear the earth sing above all the racket our species makes. Listening to owls is a remedy for such deafness.”
