Determining whether a barn owl is male or female can be challenging and requires a keen eye, patience, and typically a good photograph or two of the barn owl whose sex you are trying to ascertain. I have created a drawing of the male and female barn owls side by side and slightly exaggerated the differences, so you can understand how to distinguish between a male and female barn owl.
How to tell is a Barn Owl is Male or Female?
The Top 10 key indicators to look for –
Working out if a Barn Owl is a male or female needs a keen eye, patience, and often, clear photographs. I’ve created an illustrative guide, slightly exaggerating key differences between male and female Barn Owls, to help you distinguish them. This resource is available as a PDF please feel free to use it.
1- Size – Like most owls and birds of prey, female barn owls are larger than males. The male weighs approximately 300g, while the female weighs slightly more, at around 360g, making her typically 20% heavier than the male. By looking at the owls, it’s actually quite challenging to work out which owl is larger, even when they are standing next to each other. Still, these size differences, although subtle, can help identify the male and female of a nesting pair. When the female sits and incubates her eggs, and then starts raising the young, she’s totally reliant on the male bringing her food, this extra size and weight all help the female to survive.
2- The facial disc — The facial disc feathers of the Barn Owl are the feathers around the Barn Owl’s face that give it that classic and adorable heart shape. Females often have slightly darker brown feathers around the rim of the facial disc. Sometimes it’s hard to see the darker colouration of these feathers but at certain angles you can see the rim’s colours more clearly. The female’s rim feathers are usually only slightly darker than that of a male’s, but if you have the two owls side by side, it can generally be observed.
3- Overall Colour – The female barn owl tends to exhibit a slightly darker, richer brown colour over most of its body, inline with the darker facial rim. Male Barn Owls however usually display a lighter colour overall, with their chest area commonly being a cleaner white than that of the females. The whiter chest tends to be a good indicator that it could be a male Barn Owl but females are also occasionally known to have a fairly white chest so look for multiple clues to work out if a Barn Owl is male or female.
4- Who wears the buff-coloured scarf? Female barn owls generally have a slightly buff-coloured patch covering their throat, while the male’s throat feathers are whiter. Sometimes, the buff colour is only noticeable in natural daylight and it’s too subtle to be seen on live Barn Owl web cameras. The buff-coloured throat area serves as a really good clue indicating that it is a female, particularly if the owl also has spots or flecks on its chest or flanks.
5- Spot the spots – Females tend to have small flecks or spots down their front flanks; these spots can extend across the chest plumage or only to the sides. Males generally have purer white plumage with little or no flecks or spots, although they too can possess some speckled marks. If the chest of the Barn Owl is adorned with many specks or spots, and the throat area is a buff colour it is very likely to be female.
6- Tales of the tail feathers – As with the overall darker colour of the female, the female Barn Owl typically has slightly darker tail feathers than the male. Again you will really need to see them side by side to spot the difference in the colourisation.
7- Courtship Behaviour – Barn owl courtship involves mutual preening and vocalisations known as chittering. They are often seen grooming each other and roosting side by side. During the bonding process, the female frequently undertakes most of the grooming and preening of the “henpecked” male. This slight imbalance in preening serves as an early visual cue to help distinguish between the female and male barn owl.
8- Territorial Behaviour – Due to her instinctive desire to nest and breed, the female may display stronger territorial behaviour than the male. This behaviour can include not wanting to leave a nesting territory and also warn off other females that stray into its territory. If you are lucky enough to spot a nesting pair of Barn Owls looking at where to nest they will check out potential nests together. The female will usually go in the nest and look around, the male will often stay outside the nest and may only briefly look into it after she’s left. Tawny Owls exhibit a similar behavior when choosing a nest from my observations.
9- Who does the hunting? – If you are fortunate enough to have cameras in a barn owl nest box during the breeding season, you can see which is the female as she sits on the eggs. However, if you do not have nest cameras, you can identify the male since it is always the male that does the hunting, while the female remains on the eggs to incubate them. The female is confined to the nest for approximately two months as the eggs hatch and the owlets grow.
10 – Conclusion – Join the dots to find the answer
Remember you ideally need to look for multiple clues to work out the sex of a Barn Owl; one clue alone is not generally sufficient. I had two particular Barn Owls that had only a few flecks on their flanks and none on their chest, their chest area was actually quite white. However they both had a few flecks and a buff coloured throat, both had a slightly overall darker colouring I suspected they were both female. I observed them a lot and they “acted” like females, both of these two Barn Owls henpecked and preened the slightly smaller male Barn Owl as if they were caring for their “man”. It was the way they behaved along with the visual clues that I concluded they were female. Obviously when they laid eggs my conclusions were confirmed!
If you want information about Owls, please check out my other articles here on the Barn Owl Live website. There are numerous articles that have been written based on my observation of barn owls in my barn owl nest boxes. If you are looking for videos of barn owls and their behaviour, please check out my YouTube channel @BarnOwlLive, where you can find many videos on barn owls and other wildlife. If you’re seeking a good general reference document covering Barn Owls, my Comprehensive Guide to Barn Owls is a good place to start.
If you want to look at some of my latest wildlife pictures, why not follow me on my Instagram account as I post my most recent wildlife photos there, often with tips on how to get them. The Instagram account for wildlife photography is PeakyWildlife