From Cyryl Boryczko

Ural Owl (Strix uralensis), Niepołomice Forest, 26/12/2025.

I started this year without a single owl on my sighting list. During one of my spring birding trips, Michał Baran "promised" me that I would end the year with at least four species. He delivered. The Ural is my fourth owl in Poland, after the Pygmy Owl, Long-eared Owl, and Tawny Owl, and my fifth overall (I also added a Screech Owl in the USA). For Senior Ornithologist Assistant Aneta Boryczko, it was her first owl, and what an owl! After nearly three hours of fruitless searching in the Niepołomice Forest, luck smiled on us, and Michał spotted this beautiful bird from the car, near a thicket on the edge of the forest. Our joy was immense!

The Ural owl is one of the largest nesting owls in Poland. Only the Eurasian eagle owl and the great grey owl are larger. It is active both night and day. Literature indicates that it hunts primarily at dusk, but today we saw it hunt (though we don't know if it was successful) at high noon. It feeds primarily on small mammals, but birds, including even smaller owls, may also form part of its diet. Ural owl pairs bond for their entire lives, approximately 20 years, and these birds can aggressively defend their nests. Attacks on humans are even rare. The population in Poland is estimated at around 1,300-1,800 pairs, with a growing tendency.

From Lotus Winnie Lee

❤️🦉My love for Owls🦉❤️

Magnificent adult male Snowy Owl in New York. Incredible experience to have one flying past you when least expected.

From Jen Marie

This screech owl sure had the right idea about how to spend a snow day....napping. I love how the snow made a little witch's hat for him or her.

Screech Owls do not migrate. They maintain home ranges even throughout the winter. They are one of three types of owls that can be found here in Ohio year-round. The others are barred owls and great-horned owls.

From Middle TN Raptor Center

Our resident education ambassador, Lucy, loves her toys, but it was not a good Valentine's day for Stinky the Skunk.

She loved Stinky so much that she decapitated him. Lucy is not a Black Widow or a Praying Mantis, who are known for decapitating and devouring things they love, oh no. She's just a Great Horned Owl who loves her toys... to death. RIP Stinky, 2025-2026.

I've always heard GHOs have no hesitation when it comes to snacking on skunks, thanks to their lack of a sense of smell.

Also, if one finds a random decapitated rabbit or large bird outdoors, a GHO is often times the culprit.

From Dick van Duijin

A little owl perched on a fence, looking back at the camera - in Belgium.

From Hope for Wildlife

This tiny Saw-whet owl arrived a week ago after being found on the ground, unable to fly and being harassed by crows. After we examined her we found that she had a bit of an injury to her left eye, so we suspect she flew into a window and ended up being stunned by the impact. She's still resting up in our ICU.

Did you know that these little owls will store excess food in the niches and hollows of trees and branches, creating a "frozen cache"? When a hunt fails and they get hungry, they will go to their freezer, take some food out, and actually sit on the frozen carcasses to thaw them out in the same way they'd incubate an egg!

From Kevin Griffin

Great Horned Owl and her Owlets

From Jen Marie

I think these adorable baby screech owls enjoyed people watching as much as we enjoyed watching them from several springtimes ago. These little owls are only about 7 inches tall when full-grown and are primarily solitary, except during the breeding season.

From Paul Bankowitsch

Baby Snowy Owl

From Sean Pollock

This Northern Pygmy Owl was a welcomed incidental find. Such amazing little owls. Amazingly fast and incredibly cute.

From Krzysztof Baranowski

Ryukyu scops owl (Otus elegans) with a focused look. Japan, 7/2025

Canon R5 Mk II

RF 400mm 2.8

1/80s, F2.8 ISO800

The Ryuku Scops, or the Elegant Owl, is from the Ryuku Islands, which are found between Taiwan and Kyushu, Japan.

I couldn't find too much on this little owl other than it's mainly an insectivore.

Leaf-rolling Cricket, its favorite meal.

Bush Cricket, another favorite.

This data sheet has the finer details, but the most interesting fact in there isn't about the owl so much as it is a tree.

The environment of Minami- daito Island has been modified so greatly and so many species have been introduced that little of the original environment remains in the island. As a result, four en- demic subspecies of birds be- came extinct, but Ryukyu Scops Owls have survived. It is Casuarina introduced to the island that played a key role in conserving the population of Ryukyu Scops Owls.

Casuarina equisetifolia

Since Casuarina grows quickly, it was planted for hardening the soil of a marsh and as a shelterbelt after deforestation. In addition, Casuarina tends to form a cavity in it. Research showed that introduced Casuarina had 15 times as many cavities as native Livistona, which Ryukyu Scops Owls principally used as a nest tree before deforestation. As mentioned above, therefore, they mostly nest in the cavities of Casuarina now (Photo. 4)

A strange case of an invasive species benefiting an evaluated local one! Because the owls need holey trees for protection and nesting, this one works out even better than native trees.

While restoring natural environments is an important goal, things like this show that process can be complicated at times.

From Blue Ridge Wildlife Center

This Great-horned owl came into our center with blood in the mouth and with bruising on parts of his body. This patient's mucous membranes were very pale and the owl was in very poor body condition.

When we took a blood sample, the blood did not clot for over ten minutes! The pale membranes, ongoing bleeding, and excessive bruising are all signs we see commonly in cases of anticoagulant rodenticide (AR) toxicity.

As the name implies, ARs kill by preventing the normal clotting of blood. This means small injuries that might normally lead to a bruise (or less) can now cause an animal to bleed to death. It is not a humane way to die for the intended targets nor for the predators that eat those victims.

AR toxicity is not uncommon in wildlife. In fact, studies on multiple species of raptors have shown that nearly 100% have subclinical levels of these poisons in their blood and tissues. In 2021, a study on over 200 bald eagles revealed that 83% of those samples had detectable AR levels.

Although rodenticide toxicity is considered the primary cause of death in only 4% of these cases, the impacts of subclinical levels are not well studied. As we commonly see in individuals with subclinical lead levels, who almost all come to us as trauma cases, we highly suspect that these subclinical levels of AR toxicity predispose many of these animals to potentially fatal injury.

Studies that have specifically looked for rodenticides in non-target wildlife have found it with alarming frequency - over 70% of animals tested in multiple studies. A study from Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University showed 100% of the Red- tailed Hawks tested between 2017-2019 had detectable levels of anticoagulant rodenticides with 91% of these hawks having two or more types of rodenticide detected.

Sadly, these poisons are sold over-the-counter and advertised as a way to rid your home of unwanted rodents. What sellers don't tell you is that this is a horrible way to die for the intended victims and it will harm or kill unintended targets, including your pets and wildlife.

To make matters worse, they don't tell you that killing the individual pests will not solve your problem. Until you figure out how those pests are entering and make corrections/repairs to close off those entry ways and secure food sources, more rodents will continue to use that space. The wildlife in your area will continue to find the rodents as they are dying (which makes them very easy and desirable prey). It is an endless cycle of death that you can spend money on forever and it still does not keep rodents out of your home.

Thankfully, this Great-horned owl has had a good response to the first few days of therapy. We are administering higher doses of vitamin K to help support clotting, and providing fluid and nutritional support. Due to the emaciation, this bird was started on an easily-digestible liquid diet and has since been upgraded to eating whole prey.

It is our responsibility as good stewards of environmental health to make sure we are reducing our negative impacts on wildlife. Although we know that pest species can cause significant damage, using humane alternatives in our homes is imperative if we want their predators and a healthy natural food web to continue to help manage wild rodent populations.

Here's a shot of this patient's mouth, and you can easily see it looks unhealthy.

This young GHO both demonstrates a healthy owl mouth, which should look much like ours, at least as far as color goes, and also my face when I read stories like this.

The remaining pics are more of the owl's evaluation.