Owls rule autumn’s nighttime chatter

In the early spring, courting songbirds sang at dusk and spring peepers made most of the racket at night. In the summer, cicadas droned on through the evening and the whip-poor-wills and chuck-will’s-widows repeated over and over their plaintive songs from the darkened woods.

Now, the voices of autumn — the owls — are about to reclaim the night. The owls, of course, hoot, hiss and screech all year long, but it is in autumn and winter when they take center stage and their haunting sounds fill the dusk and darkness.

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JIM ZIPP

Autumn and winter are prime breeding seasons for barred owls, which will be calling for mates and to claim territory.

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As if warming up for the season, a barred owl has been calling almost every evening now from the woods behind my home on the outskirts of Decatur. My friend Liz Horsey in northwest Atlanta says she has been hearing a barred owl calling from a nearby yard and, the other day, she heard a great horned owl hooting.

It may be that the owls call no more insistently in fall and winter than they do in spring. Perhaps we hear them more in the fall because they seem to have little competition at night.

But a more valid reason for hearing more of them now is that fall and winter are prime breeding time for the birds, especially barred, great horned and barn owls. Many of them begin announcing territory as early as October. After that, their calling escalates as they try to attract mates for the nesting season that begins as early as December.

Early fall also is “dispersal” time for young owls, when they finally leave their parents and strike off on their own. (Even though young owls fledge from their nests in late spring, they still often hang around with their parents until early fall.) Most young owls move only a short distance away; others may go far. But with more owls out and about now, it follows that there will be more hooting and calling going on: The adults are letting the young ones know, “This territory is taken.”

For people, an owl hooting nearby can be quite disconcerting. The hoots even give some folks the willies.

When I was a boy growing up on Johns Island on the South Carolina coast, a place steeped in voodoo beliefs, a hooting owl was a sign that dreadful beings called “boohags” were about. Boohags supposedly were dead people who had come back to Earth to ride you and sap your energy. “‘Hag gon’ ride somebody tonight,” my neighbor would say when an owl hooted. Back then, I believed her.

Hooting owls will be quite popular at the end of this month when we celebrate Halloween and witches, goblins and trick-or-treaters rule the night. With a long history of an association with death and evil, owls are symbolic of Halloween. Celts, Romans, eastern Europeans, Native Americans, Asians and Aztecs all considered owls to be evil omens.

Others, though, associated the birds with health and wisdom.

Hoots

Folks in the South often refer to a bird known as the “hoot owl.” Actually, there’s no species of owl strictly known as a hoot owl. The bird most usually referred to as such is the barred owl, and occasionally the great horned owl. Both are fairly common in Georgia and are some of the state’s earliest breeders, with baby owlets fledging as early as February.

The barred owl’s call consists of six or seven repeated notes, usually with a rising, questioning intonation at the end. It takes little imagination to hear them saying, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?” The great horned owl, named for tufts of head feathers that resemble horns, has a deeper, gruffier voice. Its low, muffled hoots usually go something like “hoo, hoo, hoo, hooo-hoo.” Sometimes, though, its call booms out in the night.

You also may hear the little Eastern screech owl, which is poorly named. Its call is neither a screech nor a hoot, but rather a quavery, lonesome wail that starts high and slurs down and then off. The call is surprisingly loud for such a little bird, no larger than a robin.

Whether you hear them in your yard or during an evening stroll in the woods or down a country lane, owls are worth listening to. Their calls are the spirit of autumn and winter and suggest wildness. I like to think that owls, like a mockingbird or a robin singing on a sunny day in April, sometimes call on a crisp, cool, star-filled autumn night just for the pure joy of it.

In the sky

The moon, high in the south at sunset, will be first quarter on Tuesday night, astronomer David Dundee of the Northwest Georgia Science Museum says. Venus shines brightly in the west just after sunset and sets in the west about two hours later. Jupiter is high in the south just after dark and sets in the west around midnight. Jupiter will appear near the moon on Monday night. Saturn rises out of the east just before sunrise. Mercury and Mars cannot be easily observed now.