Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How old is Alice?
A: Alice was hatched in March of 1997. She will celebrate her 10th hatch-day at the 5th Annual Festival of Owls in March 2007.
Q: How long could Alice live?
A: In captivity, if everything goes well, Alice could potentially live to be 30-50 years old. (That's HUMAN years!)
Q: How much does Alice weigh?
A: It varies during the year between 3.5 (in the fall) to 3.75 lbs (in early winter). Since Alice can't fly, her breast muscles, a big part of her weight, have atrophied. If she were perfectly healthy and living in the wild she would likely weigh more in the ballpark of 5 lbs because she's a very large female Great Horned Owl, and females are bigger than males.
Q: Do you clip her wings?
A: No. She can't fly because she broke her wing at the elbow joint when she fell out of her nest when she was only three weeks old. The damage was permanent, leaving her unable to fly. That's why she's in captivity--she couldn't make it in the wild.
Q: Can Alice turn her head all the way around?
A: It depends on your starting point. Owls have the same main range of motion that we have--that is their heads normally face forward and can rotate from side to side. Owl heads just rotate farther each way than ours do because they have twice as many neck vertebrae as humans (14 instead of 7.) Alice can turn her head straight backward and a little bit farther. But then she can turn it all the way around to the back and a little bit farther the other way. So if your starting point is in the back, then yes, owls can turn their heads more than 360 degrees. But starting from the front, even the most flexible of owl necks can't make it past 270 degrees.
Q: What does Alice eat?
A: Alice only eats meat. No birdseed. But also no hamburger or chicken either. She needs to get whole animals, fur, feathers, bones, and all, in her diet to stay healthy. Normal captive owls eat mice and rats. Alice is very persnickity about her supper--she turns her beak up to anything other than pocket gophers (Geomys bursarius). She would rather go hungry for a night than stoop to eat mice. Wild Great Horned Owls eat any kind of animals they can catch and kill including skunks, cats, snakes, mice, rabbits, squirrels, and almost anything else you can imagine, including chickens if people don't lock them up at night!
Q: Can we pet Alice?
A: No. Federal and state permits do not allow the audience to come in contact with Alice, and Alice enforces this. She bites if anyone tries to touch her. Bear in mind that although she's a human imprint and therefore thinks she's one of us and not an owl, she still has the full line of owl instincts and petting does not fall into what's acceptable in the owl world.
Q: Has Alice every hurt you (Karla)?
A: Not on purpose. Alice trained me years ago (after drawing blood with her beak) that she gives me a warning bite if I do something she doesn't like. If I persist in doing what she doesn't want me to do, then I get bit really hard. One time her leash got tangled around a high perch as she tried to fly to another perch and she landed on my head. It wasn't her fault, but her talons drew some blood from my scalp.