>Another question generated by our New Mexico birding trip.
>As we came home this evening at dusk, there was a VERY large
>owl (a great horned?) perched on the telephone pole by the
>alley at my mother's house in Truth or Consequences, NM.
>The question is: could this (or a similar) owl be responsible
>for the disappearance of her three cats? (which disappeared
>over a period of a few months). The neighbors and the vet say
>the owls are responsible, but there are also coyotes outside
>of town here. Would it be likely that the owl is responsible?
>Has anyone heard of owls eating pets? The birding handbook says
>rodents and small vertebrates- is a cat a small vertebrate?

>Thanks for the help with the mystery!
>
>LeAnn Copas and Tom Moore

A cat is indeed a small vertebrate, and Great Horned Owls are known to eat
mammals of that size with ease. If you look at the talons of a Great
Horned at close range, you'll see they're more than sufficient to capture
such prey. And I don't think an owl thinks of a cat as a "pet." I'd say
the presence of the owl at the house might be reasonable evidence for the
hypothesis.

In any museum, when you open a case with GHOWs in it, you immediately smell
skunk. I wonder if I could trap some of the feral cats in my neighborhood
and paint white stripes down their backs.....


Dennis Paulson, Director phone: (206) 756-3798
Slater Museum of Natural History fax: (206) 756-3352
University of Puget Sound e-mail: dpaulson at ups.edu
Tacoma, WA 98416