St. Johns County has a variety of habitats: from salt marshes to freshwater creeks to floodplains to name a few. That means we have a great variety of wildlife adapted to these habitats.
We have just about every owl found in Florida living in our backyards and parks: Great Horned Owls, Barred Owls, Barn Owls, Screech Owls and even the migratory Short-eared Owl.
The Great Horned Owl, the largest of our owls, is also called the Hoot Owl or the Tiger of the Sky. As in most birds of prey, the female is the larger of the two, standing 25 to 26 inches tall and weighing around 5 pounds. The male will be 18 to 19 inches tall and weigh about 3 pounds. They prey on anything from grasshoppers and lizards to rats, snakes, 'possum, armadillos, squirrels and skunks.
Its yellow eyes and black beak give the Great Horned a fierce stare and the tufts of feathers on its head look like horns. Actually, these are simply feathers it can lower against its head or raise to disguise it against the trunks of trees. There are variations in the color of any owl's feathers from one individual to another. Some Great Horned Owls are grayer, others may have more browns with tawny touches.
Owls tend to form bonded pairs for life. All Florida owls are winter nesters and October and November are when bonded pairs come back to their home nesting territories. If one dies or fails to return to the nesting site, the partner remaining will accept a new mate. This bonding means each pair gains in experience and has a better chance of successfully raising young together.
The Great Horned Owls at the St. Augustine Lighthouse are now engaged in nightly hooting concerts. The sounds often begin in the oak hammock surrounding the Lighthouse and end with one owl sitting on top of the keeper's house and the other on a window frame or on the balcony of the Lighthouse tower. Here they are in sight of each other and their white throat patches flash in time with the hooting in a vocal and visual courtship ritual.
Once owls start nesting, usually in December, they become silent.
When the young fledge sometime in March, the whole family will begin to hunt until the chicks mature and go off on their own.
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