re: Anyone interested in going owl hunting?

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Im always amazed at how many are killed at night swooping down in front of vehicles

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About 15 years ago this happened to me. Out of nowhere a big ole fat sumbitch of an owl swooped down on my truck and cracked my windshield. I about damn near had a heart attack. It scared the living shite out of me.

Im going to shoot as many as I can and hang them on the post like flathead catfish heads to brag

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Barred owls are an invasive species in the Pacific Northwest

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I think they are expanding their range I think of invasive as as non native or human introduced. If a human brought barred owls in and they were taking over the spotted owl I would see the concern

I guess black-bellied whistling ducks could be considered invasive also but again just a range expansion

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First you make a roux….

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An owl is all feathers. You'll starve if you depend on them for food.

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invasive

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I think they are expanding their range

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I have never been clear on this, and yes, it seems the ducks are in this. I do wonder what is going on with the owls and why they would expand there.

Best guess by someone who did a paper on it,

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Overall, it appears the historical lack of trees in the Great Plains acted as a barrier to the range expansion and recent increases in forests broke down this barrier. Increases in forest distribution along the Missouri River and its tributaries apparently provided Barred Owls with sufficient foraging habitat, protection from the weather, and, possibly, concealment from avian predators to allow Barred Owls to move westward. Decades later, increases in forests in the northern Great Plains allowed Barred Owls to connect their eastern and western distributions across southern Canada. These increases in forests evidently were caused by European settlers excluding fires historically set by Native Americans, suppressing fires and planting trees. They apparently were caused, to lesser degrees, by European settlers extirpating bison (Bison bison), overhunting elk (Cervus elaphus) and deer (Odocoileus spp.) and, in some areas, extirpating beaver (Castor canadensis) and replacing native ungulates with livestock. Accordingly, it appears the range expansion was prohibited for millennia by actions of Native Americans and recently facilitated by actions of European settlers.

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My dad was a forester for IP. When we lived in Mississippi, he found a baby owl in a a hollowed out limb from a tree that a crew had cut down. He brought it home and we fed it with a medicine dropper. After he got bigger he would land on your shoulder and perch on your hand. I was in 4th grade. All of my friends came over and helped feed him. His name was Tapper.

We had him for over a year. He stayed in the backyard and in a metal shed on concrete when it was raining or cold. We had a female Doberman that never tried to hurt him. The metal shed was where we kept her puppies when she had them. She thought he was a baby to take care of. When my parents decided to move back to Louisiana, we gave him to the Jackson Zoo.

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When I was a kid my grandparents neighbors had a Barn Owl in a kennel like pen with a wire roof. They caught that thing when it full mature having hit with their car one night and picking its stunned body up thinking it was dead. It came to life shortly after and they penned it up until it died. The fed it all sorts of shite but mostly chicken. It was meaner than shite and would attack anything that got close to that pen. Why they kept the damned thing about the place is anyone's guess...their son was a year older than me and he had to feed it and it never got used to him coming close. It did not live long, less than a year best I remember. It was stressed the entire time and I suspect died about as bad as a wild animal could die. Folks can be incredibly stupid at times.