Birds of Central Oklahoma

All birds Owls

Eastern Screech-Owl, gray form
Gray form Photo by Greg Hume. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Eastern Screech-Owl

Megascops asio

Here all year.

Recorded by Tim Spahr. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, via xeno-canto, trimmed and volume evened out.

Look for

  1. A small owl with short ear tufts. It can raise them up or lay them flat, so its head shape changes.
  2. Most are gray. Some are reddish or brown instead.
  3. A small bill that's a grayish green color.

A little about it

Screech-owls live here all year and don't migrate. Lots of people have one living close by and never know it. It sleeps all day and wakes up at dusk.

It hunts at night, mostly in the first 4 hours after dark. It swoops down and grabs food with its sharp claws. It eats big bugs like moths and beetles, plus mice. It can find food by sound as well as by sight. Small prey gets swallowed whole.

When it feels scared, it stretches up tall and pulls its feathers in tight. That makes it look like a branch. For a bird named screech-owl, its calls are soft. Listen for whinnies and gentle trills. The male's trill lasts 2 or 3 seconds and has about 35 notes.

It nests in a hole in a tree, like an old woodpecker hole. It will use a nest box too. The female lays white eggs, often 4 or 5, and the male brings her food while she sits on them. The young leave the nest about 4 weeks after they hatch.

Fun fact

Screech-owl parents sometimes bring a live blind snake to the nest. The tiny snake looks like a worm. It lives in the mess at the bottom of the nest and eats bugs there, which may help keep the baby owls free of pests.

When it's here

Taller bars mean more sightings. Most often seen in June.

Birds by season

How big

SparrowRobinCrowGoose

9 to 10 inches. About as big as a robin.

Where to look

Woods and shady yards with big old trees. In the daytime it hides in a tree hole or thick leaves, so listen for it after dark.

  • In the woods
  • Yards and parks

Could it be something else?

  • Great Horned Owl

    It has ear tufts too, but it's much bigger, 18 to 24 inches long. It's brown and gray, with a white patch on its throat.

More photos

Eastern Screech-Owl, red-brown form
Red-brown form Photo by Liren Varghese. CC BY, via iNaturalist.

Where these facts come from