They blend back into the background when they’ve gotten satisfactory attention.

I’m sure once it righted itself, it did the cat thing of quickly cleaning itself and acting like nothing happened. 😆

No taste for bugs 😁

The GHO is one of the largest North American owls, and while the turkey is still bigger, the owls are built to take down animals much larger than one would expect.

Some quick stats I grabbed from Google:

Adult great horned owls range in length from 43 to 64 cm (17 to 25 in), with an average of 55 cm (22 in), and possess a wingspan of 91 to 153 cm (3 ft 0 in to 5 ft 0 in), with an average of 122 cm (48 in). Females are somewhat larger than males.[15][22] Mean body weight is 1,608 g (3.545 lb) for females and 1,224 g (2.698 lb) for males.

Mature males [wild turkey] are about 2.5 feet tall and weigh up to 25 pounds. The average weight is 18 to 20 pounds. The females (hens) are smaller than toms and weigh 9 to 12 pounds. [4kg to 5.5kg]

Here’s a picture I feel accurately depicts their size. Lots have the owl closer to the camera to look bigger, but this is pretty realistic.

They also have tremendous grip strength of about 350 to 500 psi, where your typical large scary dog is about 250 psi.

Neat video!

If anyone is wondering, this owl would have indeed eaten this turkey if things had gone differently.

WildTurkeyLab: Predation from Great-horned Owls

When you think about predators that kill adult wild turkeys, you often think about mammals such as coyotes and bobcats. And although those are certainly predators of adults, we see consistent predation on adults from great-horned owls.

Interestingly, these owls typically kill adults at the roost site, and they kill toms more often than hens.

I suspect that in many cases, toms in particular start gobbling in the morning and horned owls can locate and attack toms while they’re roosting and distracted.

Evidence at kill sites is distinctive, in that owls appear to hit the bird and carry them to the ground 20+ yards away from the roost tree – so there is a trail of feathers from the roost tree to the carcass. The owls typically remove the bird’s head, and then remove skin and meat from the breast and legs.

But we’ve also seen instances where the bird was killed and no meat was removed, suggesting that the predation event was not directed at food acquisition, which is interesting.

The take home is, great horned owls are a relevant predator of adult wild turkeys and leave distinctive pieces of evidence at the scene.

Nelly is Internet gold!

swisshhhhhh

Scripting is the closest thing to magic I’ve seen in real life. Wave your hand over the script and poof, a job is done.

I automated so much at my last job I usually never “worked” more than a half hour a day. I am not a programmer, but I slowly learned enough Excel functions and VBA, then simple batch files and some AutoHotkey. Since it was only stuff for my job I needed to learn to program for, it took much less time than learning to program for any situation. Also much of your work is going to be relatively the same as many others’ work, so there is a lot of code out there you can lift from and tweak until you learn to build it from scratch.

When browsing in All or similar, there’s a non-zero chance of coming across things that can be offensive, explicit, or disgusting. You shouldn’t encounter anything pornographic or where people die or get horribly injured, but that is my only expectation.

I browse in thumbnail view for that reason. It’s enough to see if I want to see a full image, if it’s not something I want to see, I didn’t get hit full blast by it, and if it’s something I don’t want people around to see at that moment, it’s much harder for them to see it and faster to scroll past.

When you select a sort that pulls from every community, it’s you asking to see everything. Death, injury, and private parts are about the only things the bulk of society can agree are at least somewhat offensive, so those are the only things you should expect to see blocked by a NSFW filter. Lewd, gross, and offensive are still free to pass, for better or worse. That’s the Internet culture has existed for most of its existence and feels pretty universal in my experience.

May 2024

January 2024

Size of the GEO’s talon

End of September 2023