The Owl Says "Hoot!"

I'm working at my desk and there is an owl outside making a racket! Hoot-Hoot! How cool!

I think it's this guy, the Barred Owl. Either that or it's a Spotted Owl.

(Later)

Upon further research it probably is a Barred owl which is now common in the Pacific Northwest and is a "generalist" which means it eats anything that moves, including competing Spotted Owls. There are turf wars going on outside my door that I'm not even aware of. Poor Spotted owls : (

More recently, Forsman and his colleagues have also been documenting the invasion of the barred owl into the Pacific Northwest. "For the last thirty years we've been trying to come up with ways of protecting the spotted owl," says Forsman, "and now all of a sudden, this huge monkey wrench gets thrown into the works. In the past, we could assume that what we were seeing in terms of habitat would help us to understand what was happening with the spotted owl. Now we don't know if spotted owls aren't there because there is no habitat for them or because of the barred owls."

"The barred owl is a generalist, so it'll eat almost anything," says Tom Hamer, a consulting biologist who has studied the interaction of the two owls in the northern Cascade Range of Washington State. "It will eat flying squirrels and snowshoe hares, which the spotted owl also eats. But the barred owl will also hunt trout and amphibians in small streams and eat anything else that crosses its path, including grouse." Because the barred owl is such an adaptable hunter, it can live off a home range of only about 1,600 acres in the northern Cascades.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_2_108/ai_54032987