Barred Owl | Strix varia

Voice

The call is one of the most recognisable bird sounds on the continent: eight or nine hollow notes, rendered as who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all, with the last syllable sliding downward. At night pairs answer each other in a raucous duet of cackles, barks, gurgles and screams. There is also a rising hoo-aaah and, during squabbles, the snapping of the bill. It is loudest in late winter but calls year round, sometimes in daylight.

Identification

Grey-brown, with a round head lacking ear tufts and a pale facial disc marked by fine dark rings. The pattern below settles it: horizontal barring across the throat and upper breast, vertical streaking down the belly and flanks. The eyes are dark brown to almost black, the bill yellow; wings and tail are barred brown and white. The sexes are alike, the female larger. In flight the heavy, flat-faced head is obvious, which rules out a hawk even at a distance.

Confusion species

Spotted Owl is smaller and darker and carries round white spots over the whole underside instead of bars and streaks; where the two overlap in the west, hybrids occur, mixing both patterns. Great Horned Owl is bigger, with ear tufts and bright yellow eyes. Great Grey Owl is much larger and greyer, with yellow eyes and a white patch under the bill. Any tufted silhouette is ruled out at once by the round, tuftless head.

Habitat

Extensive, unfragmented forest of some age, preferably mixed and damp: swamp forest, stream valleys, riverbanks and old deciduous woods with thick trunks. It needs tree cavities to nest in and hunts from low perches in the understorey. Open farmland and young plantations are avoided, but in older suburbs with big trees it settles close to houses. In the west it has also taken over conifer forest that only Spotted Owls once held.

Range and movements

Resident from southeastern Alaska and southern Canada through the eastern United States to Florida and east Texas. Around 1900 the range stopped at the Great Plains; tree planting, fire suppression and the loss of bison and beaver created a wooded belt along which the owl moved west. It reached British Columbia in 1943, Washington about 1965, Oregon in 1972 and northern California in 1976, and is now in the Sierra Nevada. It does not migrate: ringed birds stay in the same wood for life.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Go to damp deciduous woodland near water an hour after sunset in February or March and listen; this is the owl most likely to call unprompted, and its mate usually answers within a minute. By day it is given away by jays and crows mobbing one tree. In the American northwest it is worth logging calling birds: their spread there is tracked closely.

Conservation

Least Concern (LC) on the Red List; Partners in Flight puts the population near 3.5 million birds, rising by a little over one per cent a year since 1966. Logging of mature forest hurts it locally and the Great Horned Owl is its chief predator, but the stock as a whole is growing. Where it has pushed into the range of the Spotted Owl the picture is reversed: in 2024 the American government decided to have up to some fifteen thousand Barred Owls shot each year in the west, under half a per cent of the North American total.

Scientific name

Strix varia | Barton, 1799

Benjamin Smith Barton described the species in 1799 as Strix varius, and since it has never changed genus, author and year stand without parentheses. The ending was later adjusted to agree with the feminine genus name, so the name now reads Strix varia. Strix is Latin for a bird of the night, taken from Greek strinx, and was introduced by Linnaeus in 1758. varia means 'variegated' or 'mottled', after the barred and streaked plumage. The specimen described came from Pennsylvania.