Most owls hunt at night, and sound helps them. An owl's ears are holes in its head, hidden under feathers, and the ring of feathers around its face, called the facial disc, helps funnel sound to its ears. An owl's facial ruff and disc form parabolic troughs that lead to the ears and can increase sound pressure tenfold. Owls hear low-frequency sounds better than most birds do, and they are sensitive across a wide range of frequencies. An owl can hear a mouse step on a twig from about 75 feet (23 meters) away, and a great gray owl can find a rodent under the snow by sound.
A sound from the right reaches the right ear first and is a little louder there, because the head partly blocks it from the left ear, and owls, humans and other two-eared animals find where a sound comes from by using these differences. A barn owl's two ear openings are at different heights, which sharpens its ability to tell how high or low a sound is, and whenever a barn owl hears a sound, it turns its head to face the source. The part of an owl's brain that handles hearing has more nerve cells than that of other birds of about the same size, and an owl's outer ear tube and inner ear are large, which helps it detect sounds well.
Owls have big eyes, but owls cannot see in total darkness, and owl eyes are shaped like tubes, not balls. Owls have small skulls, so their big eyes, which need large corneas to collect light, could not grow outward and took a rod shape instead, and an owl's retina holds a very high number of rods compared with other birds, which gives it a heightened sense of vision in dim light. An owl's eyes are fixed in its skull by a bony ring, so the owl has good two-eyed vision but must turn its head to see to either side. An owl can turn its head far around to look behind it, and it bobs and sways its head to judge distance.
Now let's turn from hearing to flying. Many owls fly almost without a sound, and owl wings quiet the air in three ways: a stiff comb on the front edge of the outer feathers, soft fringes on the back edge, and a soft, downy covering on the feathers. Owls have large wings for their body size, which lets them fly slowly, and a large owl such as a barn owl can fly as slowly as two miles per hour, gliding with little flapping. Silent flight matters less to owls that hunt over water or by day, and many of them lack the quieting feather features.
Most owls hunt by sitting and waiting on a perch, then dropping or gliding down, and only light-winged owls such as the long-eared and short-eared owl hunt much in the air. Owls eat many kinds of prey, from small mammals to birds, lizards and insects, and a few owls eat fish. Barn owls eat many rats, mice and voles, and a snowy owl's favorite food is lemmings. Snowy owls lay more eggs in years when their prey, such as lemmings, is plentiful. The size of an owl's feet is usually a sign of how big a prey animal it can take, and owls grab their food with sharp claws called talons. In one study, voles froze longer when they were near white-bellied barn owls than near red-bellied ones.
Owls have no teeth, so they often swallow their food whole. They cough up pellets of fur and bones that they cannot digest, and because the digestive juices of an owl's stomach are not as acidic, owl pellets contain the bones of the owl's previous meal, along with fur, feathers or insect parts. Taking apart an owl pellet shows what the owl ate, and scientists have found species they did not know lived in an area by digging through owl pellets. Owls are hard to study in the dark, and much of their socializing is done with their voices. Owls also help people by eating rodents such as mice and rats.
Next, let's look at where owls make their homes. Most owls do not build their own nests, but use old nests of other birds or holes in trees. Burrowing owls often use burrows dug by other animals, such as prairie dogs, ground squirrels and badgers, rather than digging their own. Most owls stay in the same area all year, and very few kinds of owls migrate. Owls lay more eggs when there is plenty of food and fewer when food is scarce, and some owls skip breeding in years when food is scarce. In Washington State, scientists have built artificial burrows for western burrowing owls from corrugated drainpipes that lead to a nest chamber in a 55-gallon barrel.
Between 1966 and 2013, burrowing owls in North America declined by 33 percent. Removing burrowing mammals through pest control programs has been identified as the main cause of burrowing owl declines. Blakiston's fish owl is one of the world's rarest owls and, as of November 2026, is classified as Endangered, and as of November 2026 National Geographic reports that fewer than 2,000 remain, found in Russia and parts of Asia. In 1993 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the Mexican spotted owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and in 2004 it designated critical habitat for the owl. As of November 2026, the main threat to the Mexican spotted owl in the United States is the growing risk of very large wildfires that burn whole stands of trees.
Words to know
- facial: of the face
- parabolic: bowl-shaped curve
- frequencies: sound pitches
- pellets: fur-and-bone balls
- migrate: move far away
- Endangered: at risk
