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Fun Facts
Did You Know?
Great Horned Owl — The barred owl's most common confusion species and the most widespread owl in North America. The fastest separator: ear tufts. The great horned owl has prominent feather tufts on either side of the head that look like ears or small horns. The barred owl has a completely round, smooth head with no tufts whatsoever. If the large brown owl in front of you has anything sticking up from the top of its head, it's a great horned owl. If the head is a perfect feathery circle, it's a barred owl. This works at distance, in bad light, and even in the brief moment before the bird…
If This Animal Could Talk...
"Watch closely, respect my space, and let my habitat explain the rest of the story."
If you have ever been sitting on your porch on a warm Louisiana night, minding your own business, and suddenly heard what sounded like a large drunk man yelling "WHO COOKS FOR YOU, WHO COOKS FOR YOU-AWWWW" from somewhere in the dark trees behind your yard, you have met the barred owl. Strix varia is not subtle. It is not shy. It has opinions about the night and it is sharing them whether you asked or not. The barred owl is the owl most likely to make you drop your phone, the owl most likely to make your dog lose its entire mind, and the owl most likely to be sitting twelve feet above your head looking at you while you shine a flashlight around wondering what that sound was. It was the owl. It was always the owl. It is still there.
A Few More Facts
How they hunt and forage: The barred owl is a generalist predator, which is a polite way of saying it will eat almost anything it can catch and swallow. Small mammals — mice, voles, shrews, young rabbits — are the core diet. But the menu extends to CRAWFISH, frogs, fish, snakes, lizards, large insects, earthworms, and other birds up to the size of grouse.
Live birth or eggs? no
When young are born: See the detailed species sections below.
Photo Gallery
What Is the Barred Owl Often Confused With?
The barred owl is a large, chunky, round-headed brown owl with dark eyes. Not yellow eyes — dark, almost black eyes, which is unusual among North American owls and is one of the fastest field marks after you know to look for it. Most of the owls you might encounter in Louisiana have yellow or orange eyes. The barred owl has dark eyes that absorb light rather than reflecting it, which gives it an expression of bottomless, unsettling calm. The barred owl is not angry. It is not threatening. It is simply looking at you with eyes like two holes in the night and waiting to see what you do next. The face is a round pale disc ringed in brown — the facial disc that all owls have, which functions as a parabolic reflector to funnel sound toward the ears. The barred owl's ears are positioned asymmetrically on the skull, one slightly higher than the other, which allows the bird to triangulate sound in three dimensions. It can locate a mouse under six inches of snow by sound alone and then drop through the crust onto the exact spot. The mouse community is aware of this and does not find it comforting.
Drag the handle left and right to compare Barred Owl side by side with the species it gets mistaken for most.
Barred Owl vs. American Kestrel
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Accessibility
Accessibility
The barred owl is among the most accessible wildlife subjects in North Louisiana precisely because its primary activity is making loud noise in the dark at close range. You do not need to hike, navigate difficult terrain, or arrive at a specific location before dawn. You need to go somewhere with mature trees after dark and wait. The bird will come to you, or announce itself from somewhere close enough that it might as well have.
For visitors with mobility limitations, vehicle-based owling from a parked car on a forest road at night is genuinely productive. Barred owls call from perches near roads, fly across open gaps that are visible from a vehicle, and respond to recordings played from a car window. Bodcau WMA's road network, Black Bayou Lake NWR's accessible paved areas, and the improved roads through D'Arbonne NWR all provide this kind of access without requiring any off-pavement navigation.
For visitors who are blind or have low vision, the barred owl is the ideal owling subject because the acoustic experience is the primary experience. The classic who-cooks-for-you call is distinctive and unmistakable. The caterwauling duet is one of the most dramatic acoustic wildlife events in North Louisiana and requires no visual component to be completely arresting. The WHAW alarm call announces the owl's location precisely and at volume. A night in a North Louisiana bottomland with barred owls calling is a full sensory experience that does not require sight to appreciate.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does Barred Owl live in North Louisiana?
Yes. Strix varia is a year-round resident throughout Louisiana, one of the most common owls in the state, and the owl you are most likely to encounter in North Louisiana whether you are looking for it or not. The barred owl is one of the louder animals in North Louisiana, which is a strong statement in a state with alligators and football fans.
In the dark, at a glance, any large pale shape in a tree will briefly look like any other large pale shape, but barn owls are considerably less common in North Louisiana than barred owls and considerably more likely to be found in open agricultural areas than in wooded bottomlands.
How do you identify Barred Owl?
The barred owl is a large, chunky, round-headed brown owl with dark eyes. Not yellow eyes — dark, almost black eyes, which is unusual among North American owls and is one of the fastest field marks after you know to look for it. Most of the owls you might encounter in Louisiana have yellow or orange eyes. The barred owl has dark eyes that absorb light rather than reflecting it, which gives it an expression of bottomless, unsettling calm. The barred owl is not angry. It is not threatening. It is simply looking at you with eyes like two holes in the night and waiting to see what you do next. The face is a round pale disc ringed in brown — the facial disc that all owls have, which functions as a parabolic reflector to funnel sound toward the ears. The barred owl's ears are positioned asymmetrically on the skull, one slightly higher than the other, which allows the bird to triangulate sound in three dimensions. It can locate a mouse under six inches of snow by sound alone and then drop through the crust onto the exact spot. The mouse community is aware of this and does not find it comforting.
What does Barred Owl eat?
The barred owl is a generalist predator, which is a polite way of saying it will eat almost anything it can catch and swallow. Small mammals — mice, voles, shrews, young rabbits — are the core diet. But the menu extends to CRAWFISH, frogs, fish, snakes, lizards, large insects, earthworms, and other birds up to the size of grouse
Is Barred Owl dangerous to people?
The Nesting Situation: Someone Else's Hole
Barred owls nest in tree cavities — large natural hollows in old trees, broken-off snags, and occasionally the abandoned nests of other large birds like red-tailed hawks or crows. They do not build their own nests. The barred owl has looked at nest building, assessed the effort involved, and decided that someone else's hole is perfectly adequate. The catch is that someone else's hole requires old trees big enough to have holes in them, which is why mature bottomland hardwood forest does the heavy lifting for this species. Take out the old trees and the cavities go with them.
The owls look for somewhere else, or they don't find it.
The female lays two to four eggs directly on the floor of the cavity — no nesting material beyond whatever debris has accumulated in the hollow — and incubates them for about a month while the male brings her food. This is one of the more reasonable divisions of labor in North Louisiana wildlife, because it gives the male something specific to do that he can actually do and keeps the female warm and functional through incubation. The male barred owl is not the male ruby-throated hummingbird. He is engaged and present and bringing home CRAWFISH on a schedule.
Owlets hatch covered in white down, blind, and entirely dependent. They develop quickly — the eyes open within a week, the adult-pattern feathers begin replacing the down within a month, and by six to ten weeks the owlets are branching: climbing around the nest cavity area using bill and talons before they can fly. A branching owlet on the ground is alarming to find and not actually an emergency. It is a bird in a normal developmental phase doing a normal developmental thing in an inconvenient location. The parents are nearby. Leave it alone. Back away slowly. The parents are watching you and they have talons.
Barred owls are monogamous and they mean it — pairs stay together across multiple breeding seasons, using the same territory and often the same cavity year after year. A good hollow in good timber is worth fighting for, and barred owls defend it against rival barred owls, against great horned owls, and against birders who showed up with a phone recording and thought nobody would notice.
