Who would win in a fight between a Cooper’s Hawk and a Barred Owl?  Hold that thought.  Now imagine it’s two owls versus one hawk.  Okay, proceed.

Two nights ago, I had just finished some mowing when I heard a Barred Owl not too far away.  Then I heard another, so I started recording them on my smartphone. What followed was one of the coolest wildlife spectacles I’ve ever experienced. Here’s the audio:

Fight between Cooper’s Hawk and two Barred Owls.

As soon as I started recording, it was clear that my local Cooper’s Hawk was none too happy with these Barred Owls. I don’t know what actually started the skirmish.  Perhaps the owls had gotten a bit too close to the accipiter’s nest?  Maybe it was the Coop who instigated the problem, by perhaps nabbing a fledgling owl?  I just can’t say.

What I can say is that…

By Keith L. Bildstein, Ph.D.
Sarkis Acopian Director of Conservation Science
20 January 2013

Networking with colleagues is important, especially when studying wide-ranging, migratory raptors like Turkey Vultures.  The species has a distributional range of more than 26 million square kilometers (i.e., about 8 million square miles) that stretches from Canada in the north to southernmost Argentina and Chile in the south, and individual vultures can be in my Pennsylvania backyard one day and in central Florida two weeks later.  Or, in the case of my Canadian colleague Wayne Nelson’s wing-tagged nestling “ANL-yellow,” at a nest in southeastern Alberta in mid-August 2012 and at a zoo in northern Venezuela in mid-January 2013.

Wayne Nelson took the photo of the bird being held by his colleague Dave Moore at the nest site in Alberta.

We don’t get many reports of wing-tagged Turkey Vultures south of the United States, which is one of the…