Ground-nesting Great Horned Owl evidence

[Craig Kesselheim]

Hi all - My sister and her husband spent a night kayak-camping on an island near Castine. They shared pictures with me that may be evidence of a Great Horned Owl that made its nest on the ground. There's a very large fragment of an off-white egg shell that is large enough to sit in the palm of a paddler's glove (for scale). There are two pictures of a ground nest site that was clearly a nest but with no real construction. I did some background reading in Harrison's Nests, Eggs and Nestlings of NA Birds, and in Erlich's Birder's Handbook, and also at Birds of the World online. All of these state that Great Horned Owls occasionally choose the ground as a nest site.

Extraordinarily variable; wider range of nest sites than any other bird in the Americas (Baumgartner 1938c). Most commonly uses tree nests of other species in whatever tree is available, but also uses cavities in trees and snags, cliffs, deserted buildings, artificial platforms, ledges, pipes, and will lay eggs on the ground. - Birds of the World online

I'm pretty convinced, personally.

Have others found ground nesting Great Horned Owls in their travels? It's a first for me, but that may just be my bad sleuthing.

(I'm not sharing the photos in this email because of the listserv's guidelines about attachments, but could share by request.)

Cheers,

Craig K