Hooting Up a Storm

What do you get when you cross an owl and a goat?

-A Hootenanny.

Groaner!!! But it reminds me of what's going on around here lately (minus the goat part.) Alice has been hooty like she's never been before.

Just how hooty is Alice? Take this morning for instance. Twice I blew my nose downstairs in the bathroom, and both times it triggered Alice to hoot. Now if that isn't hooty, I don't know what is.

Just setting foot on the landing at the base of the stairs (where the bathroom is), talking in the kitchen, or setting foot outside of our bedroom door are all enough to send Alice into a hooting fit.

And Alice is now hooting at work! She's never done that before unless she was upset. Now she hoots when I talk on the phone, or when there are visitors if I lean towards her and hoot. And these are tail-cocked hoots, not just regular hoots. There was a first grade boy who visited the Houston Nature Center yesterday. He's grown up listening to owl calls, and he could do the perfect rhythm hoot for a male Great Horned Owl--good enough that Alice responded to his hoot by hooting back!

Along with the excessive hootiness comes excessive nestiness. At home she dives into her nest basket (a laundry basket lined with wood shavings mounted on the wall of her room) every morning and every evening when she hasn't seen my husband or I for several hours. Then she does lots of excited "clucking" and digs and digs and digs. When she digs, she puts her face down and bites onto something if she can, and clenches her feet and scrapes them backward. I'm surprised she hasn't dug down to China yet!

But no eggs. That's good from the standpoint of doing educational programs with Alice (if she laid eggs she'd want to sit on them for at least a month.) But I'm dying to see nesting behavior, so I'm a little bummed in that department.

Ever since Alice has gone overboard with her hormones and hootiness, she's started tolerating more touching. She's never been a touchy-feely gal, but when she's totally absorbed in her hooting, she will tolerate me hugging her, feeling for a brood patch, feeling the flesh on her keel, touching her toes, and--get this--feeling her gular sac (the throat pouch that poofs out when she hoots) while she's hooting! It feels more leathery than I would have expected, but it vibrates when she hoots. Kinda cool. But keep in mind she's merely tolerating this--she doesn't seem to derive any pleasure from it.

I hadn't heard boo from the neighbor owls for about a month until last night. Victor and Virginia hooted some off to the east, and came closer after Alice started hooting inside (in response to my husband going up to her room.) Wendell and Wheezy hooted some too, but WAY off to the east of here.

So that's what's been going on lately--just a heck of a lot of hooting. Loud, too. The filament in the light bulb in Alice's room was vibrating last night each time she hooted!

Aren't you glad you don't have an owl living in your house???

Anatomy of a Hoot

Territorial hooting is a thing unto itself. I prefer to call it "hormonal" hooting, "tail-cocked" hooting, or a "hoot-a-thon" since territorial hooting is also a mate-attracting thing and not just about territory.

Alice doesn't start her tail-cocked hoots until fall, but once they start they continue through until spring. It's a goofy looking thing to see. The first time I saw an image of a Great Horned Owl in this hooting posture, I just thought it was a really bad picture. Now I know better...it was a really GOOD and accurate picture!

This type of hoot is given repeatedly (not always at the same intervals). It is also given while leaning forward with wings drooped slightly and the tail cocked nearly vertically. As with all hoots, the gular sac (or throat pouch) puffs out like a frog with each syllable of the hoot, and the beak is SHUT. When Alice is really in the hooting mood, she sometimes will hold her gular sac slightly out/inflated between hoots, but I don't think it's humanly (owly?) possibly to hold it fully inflated when there isn't the big air movement of a hoot going on.

In between hoots, the head comes up slightly and the tail goes down slightly. Then the next hoot comes, the head goes down, the tail goes up, and the body and gular sac heave with the effort of each hoot.

Apparently just like it's tough to swallow when you're looking off to the side, it's not easy to hoot unless you're facing forward. And Alice always likes to face what she's hooting at--either me or one of the wild owls. If I move around behind her while she's doing a hoot-a-thon, she'll turn around to face me.

The slightest (appropriate) noise can distract a hooting owl, so sometimes you'll hear a long pause between hoots, messing up the normal rhythm. Cats and wild owls are the chief cause of this at our house.

It's funny to watch Alice "come down" from a hoot-a-thon. As she gradually peters out, her tail slowly drops below horizontal and eventually returns to the normal downward position.

So there you have it--more than you ever wanted to know about hooting. Now you're one of the few people on earth that know what a hooting owl and a croaking frog have in common....

Wheezy Has Guts!

It’s getting toward mating season for owls, so that means more hooting, more interesting interactions, and less sleep for me.

I’m always somewhat groggy at our local Chamber of Commerce's 7 AM meetings, but I was doubly so on November 17 thanks to some interesting goings-on in the owl world at our house from 1:30-3:00 AM that morning. I'm just slow at reporting it because we got a new computer and it's taken me forever to get it all set up properly!

I’m still amazed at how well my ears are keyed in to the hooting of Great Horned Owls. I woke up at 1:30 AM that morning to the hooting of Victor and Virginia, our current resident pair, over at the neighboring farm roughly 400 yards away. This was with the windows closed from a dead sleep, mind you.

Victor is a regular hooter, but Virginia is an owl of few hoots. So it was somewhat notable that she was hooting. But frankly, she and Victor sounded pretty excited. They were hooting very rapidly, and every now and then Victor broke into some excited “hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo’s”.

They hooted at that farm for a while, then came over and hooted in the pine trees just outside our bedroom window. They sounded like they were toward the tops of the trees, but I couldn’t see them despite the bright moonlight and fresh snow. What I wouldn’t give for some good night vision!!

Then Victor and Virginia moved off toward the road along the south border of our property. All the while Wendell, the previously resident male, hooted alone off to the southeast along the dry run, where he had been forced to move after Victor gave him the boot last winter.

Things quieted down and I started to doze off. But I was jarred to my senses when I heard a single owl hooting in our pine trees soon after the other hooting had stopped. It was Wheezy! She’s Wendell’s mate, and she and Wendell had not come into our yard since early last winter before they lost the territorial battle with Victor and Virginia.

It’s one thing for one owl to sneak into someone else’s territory, but it’s a totally different matter to enter it and blatantly announce their presence by hooting! And this was the female of the pair, and I’d always heard (and had no reason not to believe) that it was the males who did most of the territorial work of the pair.

So here was Wheezy, hooting away right outside the bedroom window. (And me, lying in bed with the window open at 13 degrees Fahrenheit with my tape recorder running.) Wendell hooted back to her from the southeast, and Victor picked up hooting to the south. Virginia never hooted again that night.

Wheezy flew back and forth between the pine trees and Wendell. I can only assume she was trying to get him to follow her into the pines and reassert their claim. But she also flew off to the south and hooted…and from the best I could tell from listening out the bedroom window, that’s where Victor was hooting!

Things didn’t seem to get heated between Victor and Wheezy. Either there’s a “boys don’t hit girls” rule in owls too, or else Wheezy’s larger size was sufficient intimidation (females are larger than males). Or maybe I’m totally missing the point. But as far as I can tell, Wheezy’s got guts!

And so concludes another episode of “As the World Turns – The Owl Version.” Stayed tuned to find out: Is Wheezy thinking of leaving Wendell for Victor? Will Wheezy successfully drive Victor and Virginia back from whence they came? Is Wendell just a wimp? Will anyone lay eggs this winter? Will Alice lay eggs this winter?