Backyard and Beyond

I didn’t recognize this owl at first. Great Horned Owls (Bubo virginianus) run rather darker in the shadowed forests of the Pacific northwest, under all those Douglas-firs and dripping epiphytes. They also don’t have orange faces, as our eastern birds do.

This female is 16 years old and has lived at the Portland Audubon Nature Sanctuary’s wildlife rehab center for nearly a dozen years. Clearly a stoic ambassador, if not necessarily so for the mice.