{"id":28496,"date":"2014-12-21T16:50:12","date_gmt":"2014-12-21T23:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=28496"},"modified":"2014-12-21T17:25:11","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T00:25:11","slug":"great-horned-owl-eating-its-own-feather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/12\/21\/great-horned-owl-eating-its-own-feather\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Horned Owl Eating Its Own Feather"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years watching owls – Great Horned, Burrowing and Short-eared especially and I’ve never seen one eating its own feathers.<\/p>\n

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\"great<\/p>\n

I’ve probably spent more time with Great Horned Owls than any other owl species – especially the birds on the Montana family farm where I grew up.\u00a0 This is the mated pair that has been there for years.<\/p>\n

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\"great<\/p>\n

But I’ve also\u00a0photographed them here in Utah as in this bird on Antelope Island.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve watched them sleep and\u00a0groom and eat and do most of the normal activities you might expect of them.\u00a0 But I’ve never seen one swallow a feather.<\/p>\n

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\"western-grebe-1224-ron-dudley\"<\/p>\n

The only group of birds that I’m aware of that regularly eats feathers is grebes.\u00a0 I’ve documented Western, Clark’s and Pied-billed Grebes swallowing them.\u00a0 Even the hatchlings eat feathers as you can see here.<\/p>\n

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This is a behavior that I’ve not only never seen in owls, it’s something I’ve never observed in any species of raptor.\u00a0\u00a0 So I was fascinated recently when fellow bird photographer Daniel Dietrich sent me the following video clip of a Great Horned\u00a0Owl\u00a0doing just that – eating one of its own feathers.\u00a0 He’d seen some of my\u00a0posts about\u00a0grebes eating feathers and wondered\u00a0if I knew anything about the behavior in owls.\u00a0 I don’t but just because the behavior is new to me doesn’t necessarily mean\u00a0it’s all that unusual.<\/p>\n

Here’s the link to Daniel’s clip<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s definitely worth watching if you have any interest at all in owl behavior.\u00a0 This is not a small feather and the owl has some difficulty getting and keeping\u00a0it down but eventually it succeeds.\u00a0 It must have really wanted to eat that feather.<\/p>\n

Daniel and I would both love to get any feedback from anyone who might know how common this behavior is in Great Horned Owls in particular or in any other raptors.\u00a0 Has anyone ever seen it?\u00a0 Does anyone know what the function\/purpose of such a behavior might be in owls?\u00a0 The function is known in grebes (a dietary aid to keep fish bones in the stomach long enough to be digested\u00a0and it helps in controlling digestive parasites) but it must be something different in owls.<\/p>\n

Any thoughts or info would be appreciated by us both.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years watching owls – Great Horned, Burrowing and Short-eared especially and I’ve never seen one eating its own feathers.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28497,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5,334,405,395,1493,366],"tags":[31,2355,159,220,311,322],"class_list":["post-28496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-great-horned-owls-owls","category-miscellaneous","category-montana-favorite-locations","category-western-grebes","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-eating-feathers","tag-great-horned-owl","tag-montana-2","tag-utah-2","tag-western-grebe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/great-horned-owl-1767-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7pC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}