What Does a Barn Owl Sound Like? Screeches, Not Hoots

The barn owl’s screech

The best-known sound of the barn owl is a drawn-out, hoarse shriek, often written as “shrrreeee” or “shree”. It has no musical quality: it sounds more like tearing cloth or a long breath forced through the teeth than a bird call. It carries well across open fields on a still night.

The screech is mainly an advertising call. Single males fly around their home range in the breeding season and screech, or call from a high perch, to attract a female. Once a pair has formed, both birds screech during courtship chases at dusk. The male’s call is higher and more tremulous, while the female’s is lower and harsher, though telling them apart by ear takes practice.

Barn owls usually call while flying, so the sound often moves across the sky. That is part of what makes it so unsettling to people who do not know what it is.

Hissing, bill snapping and other defensive sounds

When a barn owl feels threatened, it switches to a different set of sounds:

• Hissing: a loud, rushing hiss, very like an angry snake. Adults and chicks both use it to warn off intruders.
• Bill snapping: sharp clicks made with the bill, sometimes described as clicking or clacking, often combined with hissing.
• Rasping calls: a cornered owl may give harsh, grating sounds while defending itself.

The sounds come with a threat display. The owl lowers its head and sways it from side to side, droops or spreads its wings, and fluffs its feathers to look bigger. A cornered barn owl may even throw itself on its back and strike out with its talons. The message is simple: keep away. If you ever hear hissing from a nest site, the best thing to do is quietly leave the area.

The snoring sound: barn owl chicks begging

Many people first meet barn owls by ear in summer, when a strange snoring comes from a barn, church tower, hollow tree or nest box. This is the food-begging call of barn owl chicks. Very young chicks make a soft chittering, which changes within days into a loud, wheezy snore repeated again and again through the night.

Begging is intense because barn owls often raise four to six chicks, and food is shared out as the parents bring it. Studies of barn owl nests in Switzerland showed that nestlings call to each other between feeds, and that the hungriest chick tends to call most and is likely to get the next prey item. The female also snores to beg food from the male while she is incubating eggs and brooding small chicks.

A snoring nest can be surprisingly loud and may go on for weeks. Chicks leave the nest at roughly 7 to 10 weeks old, and the snoring fades as they become independent.

Softer sounds: twittering and chirruping

Not every barn owl sound is harsh. During courtship, males give a shrill twittering, and pairs exchange soft chirrups and purring sounds at close range, especially around the nest. Barn owls also make a short “kee-yak” call that can be confused with one of the calls of the tawny owl.

These quiet calls are easy to miss in the wild. Most people only ever notice the screech, the hiss and the snoring of chicks.

Why barn owls inspired ghost stories

Picture a pale, almost white bird drifting silently over a churchyard at night and then letting out a long scream. It is easy to see why the barn owl collected names such as ghost owl, demon owl and death owl in English folklore. “Screech owl” and “hissing owl” were common country names in Britain, and the screech-owl of older English writing, including Shakespeare, is usually taken to be the barn owl.

The bird often roosted and nested in church towers and old buildings, which strengthened its link with graveyards and haunted places. Across Europe, a barn owl screeching near a house was often taken as a sign of bad weather, illness or death.

The truth is far less spooky. The screech is a courtship and territorial call, the hiss is self-defense, and the snoring is hungry chicks. Barn owls are harmless to people and valuable to farmers, because they eat large numbers of voles, mice and rats (see what do owls eat?).

Barn owl or tawny owl? Telling the calls apart

In Europe, the classic hooting owl of woods, parks and gardens is the tawny owl, not the barn owl. The two are easy to tell apart by ear:

The famous “twit-twoo” is mostly a tawny owl sound: a female’s “kee-wick” answered by a male’s hoot, often by two different birds. The idea that it comes from a single owl, or from a barn owl, is a myth. Learn more in why do owls hoot?.

In North America, nighttime hooting usually comes from great horned owls or barred owls, while a harsh scream over open country is often a barn owl. North America’s eastern and western screech-owls are a separate group of small owls; despite their name, they give descending whinnies and soft trills rather than screeches. For a full list of species, see owls of North America.

Tips for hearing barn owls

The best time to hear barn owls is from late winter to late summer, at dusk and through the night, near rough grassland, field margins, river banks and old farm buildings. Listen for a harsh scream passing overhead, and in June to August for the snoring of chicks from nest sites.

Barn owls are sensitive to disturbance, and in the UK they are specially protected, so it is an offense to disturb them at or near an active nest without a license. Listen from public paths, keep your distance, and never shine lights into a nest site or play recordings to attract the birds.