Fake owls and hanging crows

[Zoomie]

Hunger is an extremely powerful motivator.

 

[ladyearth]

I bought like 5 of them (big fake owls)new at TSC... mostly for the garden....waste of money...
My crew listens to the wild birds that are around and ROO ROO watches the sky... and grunts... They have plenty of shelters and spend quite a bit of the day lately under thei wired covered big area...and going out into their big fenced field..
.I see them hug the shed lately too and even the house at times. even in their toppers, "solarium". I used to let them spend time under the lattice covered big shed.... But I got tired of crawling under there and picking up poo
I see what ROO grunts at occ... but I sure cant identify. I dont know what it is..
Something got the 2 big gray geese down the road and our foster gander(their male offspring)
.he wouldnt go into the shelter we had for him
I think it was a big owl...cause even the night or early morning he disappeared I heard "HOO HOO" down from the woods.. i havent heard it since....
i saw info on that they(Big horned owl) can pick up 3 times their weight.. i tell everyone I hope the culprit choked to death while torturing beautiful Honk HONK...RIP beautiful guy..

 

[Zoomie]

@ladyearth just a small point, owls can not pick up 3 times their weight. Neither can I. I'm thinking you can't either... that would be like, what, about 300 pounds for me?

I'm afraid you were misinformed. What owls CAN do, is to sort of "butcher" their kills. They have to leave them right there, but they can saw off part of the animal with their beaks, and then fly off with that, they come back, saw off more etc.

I called up an expert on this once, because a neighbor told me that owls can fly off with an adult cat. I highly doubted this, since the cat weighed so much more than an owl. What I learned was that owls become expert in certain prey, so there are owls who for example, specialize in killing cats. However they can NOT pick them up and fly off with them. They kill the cat on the spot, and then start taking the body apart. They start with the head. They sometimes find owl nests with like, 50 cat collars in them. That's actually pretty fascinating... and it's also the reason my pet cat never goes outside! (Well, it's the owls, the coyotes, the dogs, and the fact that I live RIGHT on a highway, as well.) I find raptors fascinating, they are amazingly intelligent and highly adaptable birds, they are even learning to live right in cities and so on. Even though I think they are wonderful animals, I still don't want them to eat my chickens, so I just stick with the covered run strategy. So far that works pretty well for me.

 

[scooter147]

Great horned owls are great to have around as they will prey on skunks.