Jason Lee, left, holds a barred owl, Kathy McDaniel a barn owl and Bob Sabulsky an Eurasian eagle owl. Lee is a naturalist with Mosquito Lake State Park; McDaniel and Sabulsky are with BobKat’s Lil’ Kritters.
Ohio is an “amazing state for owls,” with 12 of the 19 North American species of owls having been spotted here, said Jason Lee, naturalist at Mosquito Lake State Park.
However, Ohio has not always been kind to its owls.
Lee focused on two owl species, whose stories in Ohio are linked, at a talk Sept. 10 at the Brookfield Public Library: the barn owl and the barred owl.
Barred owl
Barred owls – so called because of their alternating white and brown feathers – love forested areas near water to hunt for salamanders, squirrels, snakes, crayfish, chipmunks, mice and other critters. Ohio was full of such forested areas until European settlers arrived. Over the last 150 years or so, about 80 percent of Ohio’s forests were cut down, mainly to make charcoal, Lee said.
“When we did that, we took away most of their habitat,” Lee said of the barred owl.
Barred owls are resilient and they moved to forested areas of Canada and the American northwest, where they thrive. However, that migration has caused problems for other animals, most notably the Northern spotted owl.
The Northern spotted owl, which has struggled due to deforestation of old growth forests, does not eat as wide a variety of prey as the barred owl does, and the barred owl more efficiently hunts the spotted owls’ favorite foods. Barred owls also are larger and will disrupt the spotted owls’ nesting sites, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The federal agency decided to license hunters to kill barred owls, about 100,000 a year over five years, to encourage the recovery of the spotted owl population, Lee said.
“It is sad,” he said of the decision to cull barred owls. “But I also don’t want to see a species of owl completely extinct because of what we did.”
Barn owl
The human-caused deforestation that drove barred owls to better ecosystems had the opposite effect on barn owls. Barn owls prefer open fields in which to hunt mice and rats, and their numbers “skyrocketed” with the absence of barred owls, Lee said.
That skyrocketing ended starting in the ’70s, when the insecticide DDT came into popular use. DDT messes with a barn owl’s ability to process calcium, Lee said. When a barn owl lays an egg, the eggshell is thinner when there is not enough calcium in it and the adult owl often crushes its own eggs.
DDT is no longer used, but changes in agricultural practices and land use also negatively affected the barn owl, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said. ODNR, which considers barn owls to be rare in Ohio and a threatened species, instituted a recovery plan. The barn owl population “has started to rebound,” Lee said.
Other common owl species in Ohio are the snowy, short-eared, northern saw-whet, long-eared, great horned and Eastern screech owls.
Owls are well-adapted to hunting in many ways. Singling out the barn owl, with its signature heart-shaped, white face, Lee said, “She can actually move her facial feathers to direct the sound to her ears so that she can pick out where her prey’s at. She can hunt prey by sound under two to three inches of snow.
Owls also have a special “fimbriate” edge on their feathers that dampens the sound of their flying, making it easier to sneak up on prey, Lee said.
While owls are famed for their night hunting, some actually hunt during the day, Lee said.
Lee’s talk was aided by Bob Sabulsky and Kathy McDaniel of BobKat’s Lil’ Kritters, Mecca, who brought a barred owl, a barn owl and an Eurasian eagle owl to the presentation.
