Reading an Owl's Record: teacher key

Great Horned Owls, grade 12 edition, written for 12th grade and up. A great horned owl hunts mostly at night. Pellets, banding and records each tell part of its story, and this book shows what each study reported and who reported it.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. What did the authors of the 2005 pellet study write about pellet studies using only bones?
   • That a pellet finding shows an important bias that challenges their reliability (answer)
   • That bones are the only fair test
   • That pellets are too large to study
2. In the 2005 study, what did the bones in the great horned owl pellets represent?
   • Only reptiles
   • Only mammals (answer)
   • Three species of birds
3. According to a 1995 U.S. Forest Service review, where is it common for great horned owls to move in winter?
   • From Canada to the northern Great Lakes States (answer)
   • From Vermont to the Andes
   • Into the Sierra Nevada
4. What is the record for the longest life in the wild for a great horned owl, as of November 2026?
   • 13 years
   • 28 years (answer)
   • 2 years
5. Why can longevity records based on banding only go up?
   • Banding stopped in 1995
   • More birds are banded and found (answer)
   • Owls grow older each year
6. How do published incubation times for great horned owl eggs compare?
   • They are all identical
   • They were never published
   • They differ from account to account (answer)

Words

• regurgitated: coughed up
• incubation: egg-sitting time
• banding: tagging with rings
• cervical: of the neck
• longevity: length of life