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Minimize stress for the owl. If you can catch it, toss a towel or sweater over it and get it in a cardboard box or pet carrier. It should have room to be comfortable but not so much it can panic and injure itself. If you can’t catch it, keep people and animals away until help can come.
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From Melvin Laureano Nature & Wildlife
A Great Gray Owl delicately testing the strength of a pine tree's tip before settling-these large owls often perch high to scan and listen for prey below.
Mountainview County, AB
The world's largest owl by overall length, the Great Grey is mostly air.
their hollow bones help
edit: thanks for the corrections
Hollow is somewhat misleading. It's not like a soda straw or pipe, but it's lined with lattice like structure. It reminds me of a gluten matrix in bread dough!
While every gram counts to a bird, solid bones bend and flex, while birds' bones are very rigid to withstand the extreme forces flight puts against their bodies.
I'm curious to read the linked article in the other reply to get more fine details.
And they're like 75% smaller without the floof
Owls are about 40-60% floof, though this particular owl is on the high end of that spectrum since it lives in the cold.
I really believed your range until I googled it
I thought I was correct? What did you find?
Only number I'm seeing is 70% on average
I can see that for a Great Grey, they got tons of feathers everywhere, but some of the tropic and temperate owls that don't have fuzzy feet and legs would have to have a lower percentage, I'd think.
I'll have to see if I can find a more definitive source for this factoid one of these days. It's one of those things I see repeated all the time but no source is ever given.
But they are still very floody beasts whatever the actual number 😊
This has been studied and proven incorrect
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2880151/
Next day edit - Akshually this was just meant to be an interesting reply, hopefully it was well received. I was tired and busy yesterday, sorry if this came across as blunt/rude.
Nice! I will have to read this today. Thank you for sharing.
From an engineering perspective, if you take a hollow pipe and a solid bar of the same weight and length, the hollow one will be stiffer.
At first I thought that meant they'd likely need heavier bones to withstand the flying stress if they were solid. But solid bones aren't bone all the way, I don't think marrow doubles as load bearing material.
So perhaps the difference is all in respiratory capacity and weight distribution.