Eagle owl: what will happen if you enter the territory of this bird? (9 photos)

The old name of the common eagle owl is the scarecrow. And not only because of the creepy owl sounds it makes at night, but also because this bird can fly out of the darkness silently, rip your hand open and just as quickly disappear into the night. My advice to you is to stay away from the eagle owl.





Eagles are closer than you think...

It is not difficult to distinguish an eagle owl from other owls. It has a large barrel-shaped body, bright orange eyes and long feather ears, which, by the way, have nothing to do with hearing. If for some reason you forget these signs, then just pay attention to the size of the bird.



If you see this angry face, go your own way, and preferably in the other direction.

Early eagle owls are one of the largest owls on the planet. A male eagle owl can weigh 2.7 kilograms, and a female is half a kilo heavier. Its wingspan is only slightly less than 2 meters. Fortunately for southerners, in the south of their range the birds are on average 20% smaller and lighter, which means they cause proportionally less pain.





When in the middle of the working day you suddenly realized that 3 hours of sleep was not enough.

Just keep in mind that the south of the eagle owl's range is not Krasnodar or Sochi, but Southern Spain, the Arabian Peninsula, Northern India and China. The birds do not poke around in tropical forests, deserts, steppes and tundra, but the rest of Eurasia is under their control.



Although eagle owls are forest birds, they build nests not in trees, but on the ground.

And in each region they find suitable prey. The eagle owl is an opportunistic predator whose diet is limited by the size of the prey, and not by specialization. It is reliably known that eagle owls hunt 300 species of birds, 130 species of rodents, and all lagomorphs in their habitat. Sometimes even martens, sables, moles, newborn ungulates, reptiles, fish and large beetles get nuts. What can I say, they even manage to hunt hedgehogs! It turns out that needles do not protect against powerful clawed paws.



When your friend specifically greeted with maximum compression.

Moreover, the eagle owl's attack tactics are the same, regardless of the prey. The eagle owl is a nocturnal bird that skillfully uses the darkness and its ability to fly silently to suddenly attack any living creature. Having dived on the prey, the eagle owl uses its strongly curved claws up to 5 centimeters long and squeezes them on the victim with the bite force of a large dog. Even a person cannot escape from such a grip, let alone small forest creatures!



In search of a night snack...

And this sounds, of course, creepy, but what do people have to do with it? We are a little larger than the prey, so we do not fall into the eagle owls' diet and should be completely safe. Only under certain circumstances the eagle owl's cap breaks off, and he switches to berserker mode.



Hi, don't go anywhere, I'll fly right over.

Sometimes this happens when an eagle owl is injured by a person. Being a smart bird, the predator extrapolates the threat to our entire species and begins to drive people away from its habitat. Of course, it is not able to cope with a person, but this will not prevent it from inflicting a single blow, the consequences of which will heal for weeks.



Wait, I can explain everything! It was self-defense!

And sometimes people are not even to blame for the aggression of birds. Eagle owls are strictly territorial birds that cannot stand intruders. Usually, the instinct for self-preservation outweighs, and they ignore large animals from which they can get a response. But during the mating season, hormones twist the birds' brains so much that they can start to terrorize everyone around them. So in 2015, a couple of eagle owls terrorized the Dutch city of Purmerend, and 15 people playing sports at the local stadium suffered from their silent attacks at dusk. And this was in just a month!



I am not guilty of anything, they entered my territory themselves!

I don't know how the story with these eagle owls ended, but I can say one thing for sure - they caused a lot of problems for the city authorities. After all, despite the fact that eagle owls are far from extinct, their population in Europe has been declining for a long time and is now under state protection. They cannot be shot, and shooting them with a tranquilizer and taking them outside the city will be useless - the birds will simply return to their home. I hope that the situation was resolved by mutual agreement of the parties.