The Owls of Oaks Bottom

There are owls in Oaks Bottom. Most people who walk the loop never see one, and that is not bad luck — it is the entire design. An owl’s daytime job is to be invisible, and they are extremely good at it. Everything below was photographed a few miles from downtown Portland, mostly by standing still and looking at bark until a piece of it turned out to have eyes.

Two species do most of the work here. The western screech owl is about eight inches tall, gray as fir bark, and lives in holes. The barred owl is the big one with the dark eyes who asks questions. Here they both are.

🦉 There’s a quiz at the end — ten questions on what’s below. Jump to the quiz →

The Screech Owls: A Family

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Start with the hole, because the hole is the whole story. Screech owls are cavity nesters that cannot make cavities. They have no ability to excavate, so every family depends on a hole somebody else built — an old woodpecker nest, a limb scar, a rotted knot in a standing dead tree. These two exist because a woodpecker worked this trunk years ago and because nobody cut the tree down afterward.

That is worth remembering the next time somebody proposes tidying up a snag. Remove the dead wood from a neighborhood and you remove the housing supply for an entire species. Leave it standing, or put up a nest box, and owls move in.

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At this range the facial disc is already forming — that shallow bowl of stiff feathers around each face. It is not decoration. The dish works like a parabolic microphone, gathering sound across a wide area and funneling it toward ear openings hidden at its edges, and the owl can tighten the shape to focus on a single rustle. It is how a bird this small locates a mouse it cannot see.

Look at the foot hooked over the rim, too. Owls have a swivelling outer toe that can point forward for perching or rotate backward for gripping — two toes front and two back when maximum hold is needed. It is why these two can hang onto a vertical trunk weeks before they can properly fly.

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They will leave that hole before they can properly fly. Young owls go through a stage called branching — clambering out onto nearby limbs with feet and beak, flapping, falling, climbing back up, for days before real flight arrives. An owlet on the ground in early summer is usually not abandoned. It is in the middle of its apprenticeship, with a parent watching from close by.

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Here is one of the parents, roosting a short distance from the cavity. The adults do not sit inside once the owlets fill the space; they doze nearby on a shaded branch, within sight of the entrance. Childcare by proximity — close enough to respond, far enough not to advertise the hole.

Those tufts on his head are not ears. The real ear openings are hidden at the edges of the facial disc. The tufts are feathers used to break up the round outline of the head against bark, and to signal mood — raised when alert, as here; flattened when relaxed. The work is divided, too: the female broods, the male hunts all night and ferries food back, sometimes dozens of deliveries before dawn. And for a bird that weighs about what a baseball does, they are startlingly willing to strike at anything that gets too close to the nest tree.

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Compare the tufts with the photograph above and you can read his mood instantly. This is late in the day, which is exactly the right time to find one, because screech owls are crepuscular — they hunt the low light around dusk and dawn rather than the dead middle of the night. Sit near a likely cavity in the evening and you may watch one wake up.

And while we are here: a western screech owl does not screech. Its call is a soft accelerating series of hoots that birders describe as a bouncing ball coming to rest. The blood-curdling shriek everyone associates with owls belongs to the barn owl.

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The light he is sitting in is not an accident. Owls sunbathe — on cool mornings one will shift to the sunlit lip of its roost hole and let the sun raise its body temperature, which is free heat it would otherwise have to burn calories to produce. The squint is part of the dozing, not a glare.

They will do this in the same hole, in the same tree, for years. Screech owls are strongly site-faithful: they hold a territory, reuse a favorite cavity, and cache surplus food in the back of it during good hunting. Which means once you find one you have not merely taken a photograph — you have found a neighbor, and you can go back next week, and next spring when there are owlets crowding the same entrance. Most of the owls in this post are the same handful of birds, photographed over and over. That is not a shortcut. That is the method.

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The feet are the weapon. Owls do not kill with the beak; they strike feet-first and close on prey with a grip that is startling for a bird this size. The beak is only used afterward, for dismantling anything too big to swallow. Most of the time nothing gets dismantled at all — small prey goes down whole, and head-first, which folds the limbs the right way and keeps fur and feet from catching on the way down.

Finding One

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This is what walking past one looks like. Their plumage is matched to the local trees and it is regional — ours are gray and finely vermiculated, the exact palette of wet Douglas fir bark and the lichen on it, while screech owls in other parts of the country run rusty enough to vanish into oak instead. The bird is wearing the local wood.

A useful thing about that face, now that you have found it: owls are famously long-sighted and correspondingly bad at focusing up close. Those enormous fixed-tube eyes are built to resolve a mouse across a clearing, not to examine something an inch from the beak. So they feel instead — the stiff bristles around the base of the bill work as whiskers, telling the owl what it is holding at exactly the distance where its eyes are useless.

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The camouflage here is nearly total — the plumage runs into the grain of the dead wood, the dark streaks line up with the cracks — and then there is one brilliant yellow disc. The owls know it, which is why a concealed one narrows its eyes to slits. Nothing else on a trunk is a smooth bright circle.

The color of that eye may also tell you when the bird works. There is a long-standing rule of thumb among birders: yellow eyes belong to owls active in daylight and twilight; dark eyes belong to the strictly nocturnal ones. Hold that thought — you are about to meet some very dark eyes.

The Barred Owl

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There it is. Most owls out here have yellow eyes; the barred owl is the exception, and the effect is entirely different. A yellow-eyed owl looks fierce. This one looks like it is considering you.

You will hear him long before you see him. A barred owl asks a question: birders write the call down as “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?” — eight hoots with a drawl on the last note, carrying a remarkable distance through wet fir.

And he arrives without a sound. Owl flight is silent by engineering: the leading edge of the outermost flight feathers is fringed into a fine comb that breaks the rush of air into small eddies instead of one loud stream, the trailing edges are frayed soft, and the whole wing is covered in a velvety pile that absorbs what noise remains. Inaudible to the mouse, and inaudible to you. Engineers have copied that serrated edge onto wind turbine blades and aircraft to quiet them down.

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This posture is the hunt. A barred owl’s two ear openings are set at different heights on the skull — one slightly higher than the other. A sound from below therefore reaches one ear a fraction of an instant before the other, and that tiny mismatch reveals the vertical angle to the source. Tilting and turning the head sweeps those two receivers until the difference cancels. When it does, the owl is pointed exactly at its target, in complete darkness, having never seen it.

The head-turning is compulsory, not theatrical. Those enormous eyes cannot rotate in their sockets — they are fixed tubes — so to look anywhere the whole head must move. Evolution supplied the neck to match: extra vertebrae and a blood supply arranged so the arteries are not pinched when the head swings. Roughly 270 degrees, engineered for.

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This angle shows where the name comes from. Horizontal bars across the chest; vertical streaks down the belly. Bars above, streaks below — that combination is a barred owl and nothing else.

Two more notes on the plumage. The velvety surface that silences their flight also means it is not especially waterproof, so in hard Oregon rain you will find them tucked tight against a trunk under cover. And when a pair gets going, the polite hooting is only the introduction — barred owls duet, and the full courtship exchange is an escalating racket of cackles, gurgles and shrieks that sounds more like a troop of monkeys than a dignified owl. Birders call it caterwauling. Hear it once in the dark and you will not forget it.

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Here is the single best trick for finding one: look at the ground. Owls swallow prey whole and cannot digest bone or fur, so hours later they cough up a compacted pellet of everything that would not dissolve. A scatter of gray pellets under a tree means a bird has been sitting above that spot for a long time. Pull one apart and you have a complete inventory of the neighborhood’s rodents, which is exactly why they turn up in school science classes.

What goes into those pellets is broader than you would guess. Barred owls take mice and voles, certainly, but also frogs, small birds, large insects — and crayfish, waded for in shallow water like a heron. Owls that eat enough of them can end up with a faint pink cast to the belly feathers.

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Owls have three eyelids per eye — an upper that closes downward to blink, a lower that comes up for sleep, and a translucent third called the nictitating membrane that sweeps sideways like a windscreen wiper, cleaning and protecting without shutting out the light. That third lid snaps closed at the instant of a strike, shielding the eye from claws and branches at the exact moment the owl cannot afford to look away.

Finding one in daylight is mostly luck, but there is a shortcut: listen for a mob of crows or jays screaming at a single point in the canopy. Songbirds hate owls and will gang up to harass one they discover. Follow the racket and look for what the birds are shouting at.

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This bird was sitting about five feet off the trail at eye level and simply stayed there while I worked. The look reads as a challenge — I dare you to pass — which is why he ended up cast as the Bridgekeeper on my Nature Is Funny page, demanding to know the airspeed of an unladen swallow.

It is not entirely a joke, either. Barred owls are known to swoop at people who walk too close to a nest; there are well-documented cases of joggers losing hats and collecting scratches. It has never happened to me, and this one made no move at all. But the confidence in that stare is real.

A Word About “Invasive”

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When I first posted this photograph I captioned it: don’t kill me, I’m just trying to survive like everyone else. That is not a throwaway line. Barred owls in the Pacific Northwest are the subject of a federal removal program — large-scale, long-term and lethal — intended to protect the northern spotted owl, which they outcompete in old-growth forest.

I want to be fair about it, because the people who wrote that plan are not villains. The spotted owl is in genuine danger of blinking out, we caused that by logging its forests, and once barred owls arrive in the fragments that remain, the spotted owls lose. Wildlife managers are facing real and awful arithmetic with no clean answer in it.

But I would offer a distinction. Nutria were shipped here on purpose for the fur trade and turned loose. Carp were stocked. The barred owl arrived on its own wings, through country we reshaped, and settled where the living was possible. That is not the same category of thing, whatever word gets applied to it.

And at Oaks Bottom, in the middle of a city, the calculation looks different again. There is no old-growth spotted owl territory here to lose. Barred owls are uncommon in the refuge — seeing one at all is an event. Meanwhile the nutria are undeniably charming, the carp feed the eagles, and the sea lions came up the Willamette because they were following fish, which is the only plan a sea lion has ever had.

Nearly everything alive invaded somewhere at some point, humans very much included. It is worth holding the label a little loosely, and looking hard at the animal in front of you first.

Go Stand Still

Every owl in this post is within a few miles of downtown Portland, and most of them are the same few birds seen again and again. That is the part worth taking away. You do not need to travel to find owls. You need to find one tree with a hole in it, and then keep coming back.

Walk slowly. Look at bark instead of branches. Watch for a smooth bright circle where there should be grain, and listen for crows losing their minds about something. And if you find a snag with a woodpecker hole in it, remember what is probably asleep inside — and leave the dead tree standing. 🦉

Quiz: Do You Know Your Owls?

Ten questions, and every answer is somewhere above. The Bridgekeeper only asked three, so consider yourself lucky.