I saw a live owl once. Surprisingly, it was between noon and one, and it was a Great Horned Owl in a redwood tree.
Let me tell you my owl story ...
While assigned to Charlie Company, 2/12th Cavalry, my battalion was rotated for a year to Germany in 1976 as part of the Brigade 75 rotations. Charlie Company was based in Wildflecken (the only place I ever found where wherever you went, it was always uphill).
The night came that my squad was assigned the duty of pulling individual walking patrols around the ammunition point. There were two of us on each patrol and we were basically walking around the ammo point so that, at any given time, we were on opposite sides of the storage area. Obviously, the powers that be didn't think that there was much danger of an attack or infiltration of the ammo site because, other than our normal winter uniform, we were wearing shined helmet liners instead of our steel pots and, instead of any sort of weapon, we were carrying axe/mattock handles.
Somewhere between midnight and 0200, I was walking on my side of the ammo point, when I felt a slam against the side of helmet liner, knocking it off my head and send me to my hands and knees. At first, I thought the Sergeant of the Guard had sneaked up on me and whacked me on the helmet to show me how inattentive I had been. But when I looked around, there was no one there. When I picked up my helmet liner, I observed that there were a number of wicked looking slashes on it which, in a couple of places, had even penetrated through the helmet liner.
Then I saw it sitting on one of the concrete posts surrounding the ammo dump: an owl which had to have been at least two feet tall, mixed brown and white in color. The monster must have mistaken the shine of my helmet liner for something edible and had made an attack on it. The look that it was giving me indicated that it was not happy with the situation and so it stared at me for several moments and then silently took off looking for something more palatable.
I ended up having to buy a new helmet liner ... the company supply officer didn't agree with my assessment that it had been damaged in a hostile action.
As an aside, because of my eyesight, my nickname in the unit had always been "Magoo". After this incident, my nickname became "Owl" ...