A stealth hunter whose eating habits rival those of medieval kings.
A flying menace with some of the most advanced hearing systems in the world.
A cranky fluff who could steal your heart and eat it too.
This is the wise hunter of the Americas.
This is the great horned owl.
Hi, my name is Aranya Iyer and this is Animalogic's world of birds.
Today, we're at Hawkeye, a raptor facility in Ontario,
meeting one of the fluffiest and crankiest birds in the world.
Meet Tank.
This is the resident great horned owl.
Their name is a bit of a misnomer.
Their "horns" are called plumicorns, and they're just tufts of feathers,
which seem to be used for communication.
Most of their close relatives in the Bubo Genus also have plumicorns,
but they're most commonly found in Eurasia, where they're known as eagle-owls.
Their only other close relative in North America is the snowy owl, which is slightly larger,
but it doesn't have Bella Hadid's brows so it's not considered a horned owl.
This makes the great horned owl the largest bird of its kind in the Americas.
Would it be possible for you to take him for a second?
My arms are shivering, just...he's heavy.
You might be wondering why is he called Tank.
That's because this bird is an apex predator.
It'll take down anything in the forest.
As you can see, these guys are huge.
They can get up to 2.5 kilograms with the wingspan of 1.5 metres, just a bit smaller
than the largest owl in the world, they're tufted cousin, the Blakiston Fish Owl from East Asia.
This size helps them catch a huge array of prey,
including relatively large animals such as snowshoe hares, large lizards, and marmots.
This diverse diet has led them to being nicknamed the red-tailed hawk of the night,
due to the hawks' famously voracious eating habits.
There's also been accounts of these birds attacking porcupines.
Now it doesn't usually end well for this guy, but at least he tries.
Of course, their diet largely depends on their environment.
In areas with relatively few mammals they're more than happy to go for birds.
Some of them are pretty large, such as wild turkey,
ravens, and the bird who wakes up every day and chooses violence, the Canada goose.
But their mortal enemies are the crows.
Great horned owls and crows hate each other.
For an easy smash, a great horned owl will swoop in and decapitate the crow.
But if it gets away, the crow will call for backup.
Soon the murder will arrive and mob the owl, diving at it, trying to knock it off its perch.
If there's enough of them, they'll kill the great horned owl.
It's pretty metal.
Now, if the prey is small enough, great horned owls will eat it whole.
That doesn't mean that everything gets digested though.
Things like bones, nails, teeth, fur, feather,
all of that will be regurgitated about 15 hours after feeding.
What they regurgitate is in the form of these tiny little pellets,
that if you're lucky enough to find one,
you can actually dissect and put the bones together to see what exactly it was this guy ate.
Perfect for date night.
This hunting ability has helped them conquer the Americas.
There are great horned owls from Alaska to Argentina.
Their range was considered to be even larger, but the Patagonian population
was determined to be a separate species and was named the lesser-horned owl.
A bit rude, but okay.
Throughout their immense range its appearance varies,
but you can predict their size and colour based on the local climate.
You might notice that Tank here is just a little bit lighter
than the great horned owls that you see in photos.
That's because he's a subspecies of the great horned owls from the sub-arctic.
This lighter colouring helps them camouflage better in their environment.
In warmer and more humid climates they tend to be
darker as that gives them better camouflage in forests.
Additionally, humid areas are full of bacteria, and darker feathers are more resistant to them.
Like in almost every other species, those individuals living in colder
climates tend to be larger than their warmer weather conspecifics.
This helps them keep more fat reserves for the winter, and by having a smaller surface area
relative to body size, it prevents them from losing heat too quickly.
In warmer areas, being smaller helps keep them cool,
and since food is generally more abundant, they don't need large fat reserves.
But when they do need to eat, they go hunting at night;
their sense is perfectly adapted to find scurrying prey in the dark.
This guy, proportionally to its body size,
has some of the biggest eyes in terrestrial vertebrates.
Their eyes are also cylindrical.
This combination of huge retinas, with a high density of light-sensitive rod cells,
and telephoto-like lenses, gives them great acuity in near-pitch dark environments.
But since their prey are also great at hiding,
they have super sensitive ears that help them hear the faintest moves of their next prey.
Their ears are asymmetrical, with one higher than the other.
This helps them find the source of any sound in a 3D environment,
which is particularly helpful for a flying predator.
Once their prey is found, they attack.
These birds are silent but violent.
They've got two features that help them move very quietly in the forest.
One of those features is having really soft feathers.
This means that when they ruffle around they don't make too much of a sound.
The second one is their comb-like structures on the edges of their feathers.
They decrease the amount of noisy turbulent air produced when they flap their wings.
For comparison, take a listen to the noises Peregrine falcons make.
And the loud flying of a Harris's hawk.
Oh, my ears!
And then, listen to the soothing whoosh of the great horn owl's flight.
If you're a forest animal you can go from having a pretty good day
to meeting your great grandparents in the ancestral plain in a blink of an eye.
But just being good at sneaking up on prey doesn't make you an apex predator.
In the great horned owl's case,
their killer weapons are their smoky-coloured guns, their talons.
These birds are strong birds, their talon strength can go up to 400 psi.
This makes them as strong as the famously grabby golden eagle,
a giant raptor that can be three times as heavy as this owl.
Hunting is not only used for sustenance, but also as a way to get a partner.
Males court females by bringing them food.
If she's impressed they'll become a pair and will fly around looking for a nesting site.
Talk about killing two birds with one stone.
These birds don't actually build their own nests,
they steal nests from other birds of prey, like the red-tailed hawk.
In the colder parts of North America, they'll start nesting earlier than most other birds.
They establish their nest in the late fall and their babies are born in the winter,
which gives them lots of time to grow and prepare for the next winter.
This early breeding schedule is only possible
by the relative abundance of hares that time of the year.
So, thank you, Bugs.
It's because of you that these cute babies can thrive,
and eventually become the apex predators of the forest.
Before we go, let's take another look at fluffy baby owls.
So ugly yet so cute.
So what should we talk about next?
Let me know in the comments down below and don't forget to subscribe for new episodes every week.
Keep soaring to new heights.
Thanks for watching.
See ya.