OWLS: THEY ARE birds we more often hear than see, exceptionally well-camouflaged creatures,  many of whom move about in the hours of low light for an extra layer of stealth, making them seem even more mysterious.

So what do you know about owls—besides perhaps the eerie sound of their voices? For wildlife photographer and writer Paul Bannick, owls have been the subject of much study and also the topic of several of his books, and he’s here today to tell us about these incredible animals who have commanded his attention, and should command more of ours. (Above, a great gray owl and owlets.)

Paul Bannick is an award-winning author and wildlife photographer based in Seattle whose work focuses on the natural history of North America, with a particular emphasis on the conservation of birds and their habitats. He has written several previous books about owls—including “Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls” (affiliate link) and another about the great gray and one about the snowy owl, too, plus a book about woodpeckers.

Plus: Comment in the box near the bottom of the page for a chance to win a copy of “Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls.”

Read along as you listen to the May 25, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

those amazing owls, with paul bannick

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Margaret Roach: I’m so glad you’re back on the program today; Hi, Paul. Have you been out with the birds? [Laughter.]

Paul Bannick: Yes, I have. I was photographing great horned owls branching from their nests and great gray owls, three nestlings huddled together with their mother in another nest.

Margaret: Oh, those faces, those faces [laughter].

Paul: Oh, yeah.

Margaret: They’re amazing; they’re amazing-looking birds. So just a little bit of background and so forth to get us started. I mentioned the camouflage that owls kind of wear, and their often, I guess, crepuscular or even nocturnal habits. How in the world do you manage all these incredible photos in your various owl books? I mean, it’s not like they’re out there posing at high noon or anything [laughter], are they?

Paul: No, it’s a good question, Margaret. And to underline your point, owls have a distinctive shape. They’re flat-headed. They have almost a rectangular-shaped body when they’re perched, and they attract the attention of all kinds of animals, birds and mammals in particular, who know them as an animal that could potentially, let’s just say, eat their young. So owls are attacked by a wide range of animals, and they’re pursued also by humans oftentimes. So they benefit from blending into their environment and moving as little as possible.

So when they are moving, they’re in pursuit of prey or they’re in pursuit of a mate. And that means that their movement is going to occur at the same time that their prime prey is most likely either moving about, or resting in a vulnerable place. And in both cases, that tends to be at the low hours, at dusk or dawn or the first hours of darkness or the last hours of darkness before the curtain of the morning raises.

To answer the second part of the question, how do I find them? The Number 1 recommendation I have is learn about their life histories: Learn where you can find them in what habitat types, what other common elements need to be there, what trees are present, what is the canopy cover like, what other animals and plants live in those same ecosystems.

And then familiarize yourself with a place. And as your sojourns into these places unfold, you begin to be alert to what’s different. And the owls will show up significantly enough where if you’re in tune to your environment, you will notice, “Oh, is that a leaf, an extra leaf in that tree? Oh no, it’s something else.” [Laughter.] Maybe it’s an owl. “Is that a bump on that log? Oh my gosh, it’s an owl.” It comes about like that.

And a strange thing happens when you see your first owl of a particular species. Something happens in our brain. Our brain makes a map of that shape and of that size and of that color. So then in the future, as you scan the edges of that woodland or that field, your brain naturally is attracted to where it senses that shape and those colors may reside and you spot it.

Margaret: Doug Tallamy, the entomologist and ecologist who’s a specialist in Lepidoptera, was always out looking at caterpillars and moths and so forth, said it’s a “search image.” What you just said, that sort of implant in the brain of that image, it’s a search image. And it really does get imprinted in there and you know what you’re looking for the next time and the next time and the next time. It’s like it becomes familiar. It’s fascinating.

How many species in the United States and Canada; I think it was 19 I think I read in the book, is that correct? [Above, a family of barn owls in their cliffside nest.]

Paul: Yes, you have it. There’s 19 species in the U.S. and Canada. And then there are some significant subspecies, significant in that they’re threatened subspecies that for instance, a spotted owl has a Northern spotted owl, a California spotted owl and a Mexican spotted owl and the ferruginous pygmy owl  has a cactus ferruginous pygmy owl, and then what’s called a Ridgway’s pygmy owl. And those are separated because of subtle differences, but I call them out because they are indicator species for particular habitats that are at risk.

And as indicator species, their presence attests to the health of the ecosystem. Owls have that role in every ecosystem they inhabit, and they inhabit every major ecosystem with the exception of alpine tundra habitat.

Margaret: Right. Here where I am, in the kind of Hudson Valley-Berkshires area of the Northeast, we have I think Eastern screech, great horned, barred, short-eared, Northern saw whet. And then I think we see the snowy sometimes. I think that’s sort of our owl palette, so to speak. And you have different ones there where you are, that are your sort of home owls. But owls move around. I was surprised reading in the book, some of them, they’re not all resident in an area year-round, huh? They move around.

Paul: Yes, it’s quite fascinating. Owls are, for the most part, if we were to generalized, the greatest occurrence is that they’re monogamous and stay with one mate for life unless one dies.

But that is a fraction of the owls that stay on one home range, which is the area that they cover during a given year. Now within a home range, you have a territory, which is typically based upon a nest site that is defended against other owls of their species, and perhaps later after the young fledge, around a food source.

And most owls will remain on that territory year round, but there are some fascinating exceptions. So for instance, the Northern hawk owl [above, leaving her nest to find food for her young] is nomadic, and you may have it nest regularly several hundred miles from where it nested in the previous year. And the more nomadic an owl is, the less predictable its movements, and thus the less likely it is that it will pair up with the same mate year after year.

Now there are other owls that are migratory, and these owls will move 700 miles every year on fairly predictable paths. But some of them are complex in their migrations in that yes, they’ll go on the same general path, but they will show up where the food is and they have a way somehow of knowing where their target food is.

And for many owls, particularly the ones that are nomadic, the prime prey are animals in the vole and lemming families. These animals are very irruptive. Irruptive meaning they can have excessively large numbers on some years and very few on others and many owls have developed the ability to create more young, to create more eggs and raise more young, when the voles or lemmings are plentiful and may not even breed when they are not.

Margaret: So they’re opportunists. [Laughter.] They go where they go where dinner is.

Paul: Yeah. And it’s really interesting when you contrast even within a species. So for instance, the great gray owl, which is found in the Upper Great Lakes Region and in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest and then through Canada and Alaska—in the southern part of its range, it is able to feed on two major food items, the voles and gophers. As a result, when one food item’s down—usually they don’t fail both at the same time—so when one food item’s down, the other might be up.

So they breed almost every year, but they produce fewer young and they have smaller territories. In the Northern U.S. and throughout much of Canada and Alaska, during the breeding season, they feed on 90-plus-percent voles and thus the vole populations are much less regular than gopher populations. So thus these birds have to produce more young because they don’t breed every year.

So whereas the ones in the South will produce one, two, three young, the ones in the North might produce five or six, and they also have the ability not only to possess a territory but to be familiar with multiple territories and switch between those territories depending which one has more voles in a given season. [Above, a great gray owl hunting.]

Margaret: Smart. Very smart. And I read in the book “Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls,” I read that the different species, they can range from the smallest at 12 ounces, which is like a smallish crow in weight, to 6-1/2 pounds, which is like twice I think the weight of a red-tailed hawk. So that’s a pretty big creature. And I think the snowy is the largest of our owls. Is that right?

Paul: The female snowy owl is the largest owl, and it can weigh up to 6 pounds. I read once where the author compared the size and weight of a snowy owl to a bag of sugar [laughter], and think about how heavy a bag-

Margaret: It’s dense, yeah; that’s heavy. [Below, a snowy owl.]

Paul: And the smallest I would think, I mean, crow size is close, but when you see the Northern pygmy or the elf owl in particular, it feels sparrow-sized.

Margaret: Right. No, I just looked up body weights in Cornell Lab of Ornithology; they have comparative sizes of birds and so forth. And I was like, “Where does it fit if it’s—.” It’s fascinating, fascinating.

And they have other physical characteristics. I mean, the way their head turns; I’m sorry [laughter], I think you say in the book it is as much as 200 degrees or something. I mean, it’s-

Paul: Yeah, 200-plus. It’s funny the way human beings relate to owls. There’s something about the way they appear that makes us project all kinds of superpowers onto them; all the capabilities we wish we could have.

And I was once looking for a Northern hawk owl on a ranch up in or some lands up in Manitoba. And so I went to the door of a farmhouse and I knocked in the door, and I asked him if I could go inside of his fence and see if I could find an owl.

And he said, “Yeah, but first you got to hear my story. I went into my barn once and I looked and there was an owl looking at me inside the barn and it spun its head completely around six times before it stopped and looked at me.” [Laughter.]

But there’s others that believe that owls are very wise. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had tell me a story about how an owl appears right after they lost a loved one, as if the owl is the spirit of that person.

And the Ainu in Japan believed that the owls were the guardians of their villages, and the Hopi Indians had saw special reverence to the burrowing owls. And throughout human history, every society has had these strong, powerful beliefs about them, oftentimes as forewarnings of good times or bad, as symbols of wisdom or symbols of bad luck. And then even the way they look has mesmerized people.  The Mandarin word for owl is “cat-headed eagle.” [Below, juvenile burrowing owls outside their burrow.]

Margaret: [Laughter.] Cat-headed eagle. Well, that’s perfect because they are great hunters, predators. Generally speaking, I think they are thought of as raptors, even though they’re not related closely to eagles or hawks. They’re more closely related, I think, to nightjars and nighthawks.

But another thing that has always interested me, living in a rural place surrounded by a lot of forest where as we talked about with your woodpecker book not so long ago: When you have a lot of trees, especially old trees, owls and woodpeckers—no coincidence that they’re both around such habitats.

But spring comes early for owls. They don’t wait for spring. When the light just starts to get a little longer, the days start to get a little longer, they’re vocalizing and they’re nesting. And their season’s very different from a lot of our other birds, and I think that’s fascinating also.

Paul: Yeah. And it is fascinating. There is a trick to that, and that’s that owl eggs hatch at virtually the identical time that their target prey begins to become available and more abundant.

Margaret: Wow.

Paul: Their prey arises from tunnels in the ground and will be found more on the surface, or they go out of a dormancy. And so the earliest-nesting of our owls, the great horned owl: It has much more of a varied diet, so it can nest much earlier. And the advantage of nesting earlier is your young can be raised and attended to over a longer period of time before the winter comes.

And owl youngsters have a longer period of dependency than many birds. I mean, when we talked about the woodpeckers, I noted that most woodpeckers were dependent on their parents for about four weeks. For owls, it’s not unusual to be dependent on the parents for four months—much longer. So getting that early start helps them.

Now going back to the hunting, what’s fascinating about owls is owls are famous for their silent flight, but that silent flight for those owls that specialize in finding the prey based upon hearing, that silent flight also allows them to listen more carefully to the ground below without the disruption of loud wings.

So the species of owls that specialize on hunting using hearing—so short-eared owls, long-eared owls, great-gray owls—they all have silent flight, and they have ears that are offset. For you and I, our ears are in the same plane so that when we hear a sound, we turn our heads towards that sound with the sense of the direction. And owls’ ears are offset, and they’re simply holes in the skull. They’re not the ear tufts you see in a great horned owl, but they’re holes on either set of the skull that are offset so that sound reaches one ear before it reaches the other, helping the owl determine not just the direction of the sound but the height of the sound.

And they combine that with the feathers of that distinctive facial disc you see, that distinctive rim of feathers you see around the head of the typical owl, that feature is most distinctive in those owls that rely upon their hearing.

And I think of it as they can compress or expand that row or that frame of rigid feathers and it’s almost like the auditory equivalent of squinting. And it allows them to funnel that sound like a parabolic disc to those offset ears and those two—working in conjunction, not distracted by the noise of flight—allow these hearing specialists to catch prey under snow and grass while in flight. Prey that they never see, but yet they capture, even if they have to push through the turf and the snow to do it.

Margaret: Well, you mentioned the great horned, and we were talking about diet and hunting and so forth. I’ll tell you my owl story. I’ve lived in this place for decades and always I would hear the sound in what I would think of it as late winter of the barred owl, the “who cooks for you?” sound, probably the most familiar where I am of owl sounds.

And three winters ago it would be now, I didn’t hear it anymore, but I heard—well, you know who I heard. I heard the great horned owl who moved in and guess what? Guess what is among the things that the great horned owl preys upon?

So that was a shock for me. It’s almost like killing your own. Of course, we anthropomorphize and project all this stuff onto animals, and that’s crazy. And the barred hasn’t been back, and the great horned are here. They’ve taken the edge of the forest here.

I wanted just to talk a little bit about besides the right food available, what makes good owl habitat? And this kind of dovetails into what we talked about before with woodpeckers who are not disconnected from the answer to this question [laughter]. What makes good habitat for owls? A lot of them nest in cavities and trees and on tops of old broken-off trees and things like that, yes?

Paul: Yes. And I love your story about the great horned and the barred owl. And there’s two things though going on there. I love it. I mean, not because of the sad news, because it’s sad, but because even if that great horn has not eaten that barred owl, you might’ve missed that barred owl, because every habitat is ephemeral. Every habitat is constantly changed into another.

And the great horned owl prefers the forest edge, because edge hunters oftentimes are the generalists, and they benefit from being able to hunt in the woods and in the open. They can get more prey that way. Whereas the barred owl is more an owl of closed-canopy forests. And the two can coexist in the same forest as long as there’s plenty of open lands and plenty of closed-canopy forest, each will … Well, I won’t say avoid each other. The great horned doesn’t have to avoid much, but- [Laughter.]

Margaret: Guess not.

Paul: They can both coexist, and they coexist in the park near my house right now from year to year. But owl habitat’s interesting. The most important thing, not surprisingly, is where do they hunt and where do they nest? And for some, it’s in the same type of habitat.

So for instance, a Northern pygmy owl—which can be found in the mountains of the West and sometimes on the coast—the Northern pygmy owl is an edge specialist, but it hunts and nests along that edge where there’s lots of aspen and birch and alder, but also closed-canopy forests. And it will eat everything from a frog and a lizard to a vole or a Stellar’s jay or even a large woodpecker.

A Northern spotted owl only lives in closed-canopy forests that have trees that are over 150 years old, and large standing dead trees.

A burrowing owl only exists, is only able to breed and hunt, in short-grass prairie. So in other words, where the grass has been grazed low, so it can use its long legs to see in a distance in a treeless habitat.

The short-eared owl, on the other hand, requires long-grass prairie because they nest directly on the ground and they need to have their nests hidden. They hunt from the air, not from the ground or a raised perch, so they can benefit from the tall-grass prairie.

And it’s really surprising the owls help us see habitats we might otherwise miss. So for instance, if you’re out in that open landscape in an agricultural area, it’s really important that that agriculture area has the grazed areas for the burrowing owl, the tall-grass areas for the short-eared owl, but also in that same habitat, you may have long-eareds along the streamways and the riparian areas nesting in magpie nests. You might have barn owls nesting in barns and steeples or in cliffside caves, where they might have to find a cliffside cave that is safe from a great horned owl nesting in another cliffside cave or on a raptor nest.

So even a habitat like our agricultural lands that may seem bereft of wildlife may have six or seven owl species. Those owls I just mentioned might be joined by a Northern saw whet owl in a riparian area or a Western screech owl or Eastern screech owl in those same areas in a lightly tree landscape.

Now what’s important is not just the prey but also the nest. And of our 19 species, 10 of them nest in the cavities created by woodpeckers. And they benefit by the fact that each of these architects—architects meaning the 22 species of woodpeckers—creates a cavity of a specific size that would fit a specific owl, because every cavity-nesting bird provides a cavity that they can fit into but barely. They don’t want excess room where a predator might reach in with talons or a bill and pull them out. So they want a tight fit.

So the fact that there are so many woodpecker species creating cavities of different sizes facing in different habitats facing in a different direction has allowed the development of these different sized and specialized owls. And many habitats I can hear a different woodpecker wake me up in the morning and a different owl serenade me at night, for instance. [Below, a family of great gray owls.]

Margaret: Oh, that’s beautiful.  Well, we’ve run out of time. There’s a lot of owls and there’s a lot more to learn. And that’s why I was glad to spend some time with your various owl books, including “Owl: A Year in the Lives of North American Owls.” I’m always glad to talk to you and I can’t wait to see pictures of some of those babies you’ve been seeing in your recent photo journey. So thank you for making time today.

Paul: Thank you, Margaret. It’s absolutely a pleasure.

(All photos by Paul Bannick, used with permission.)

enter to win a copy of ‘owl’

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the May 25, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).