Alice Gets Her Beak Trimmed

Alice the 28 year old Great Horned Owl is cocooned in a sunny lime towel. She is lying on her back, with the camera looking down and her looking right back up. Her eyes are pear-yellow with an expression that says "do not eff with me".

A pair of retired Great Horned Owls, Alice (28) and Iris (20+) get their beaks and talons trimmed at the International Owl Center in Houston, Minnesota.

Original post – 12 Nov 2025
located in Houston, MN
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Most photos by ROB WITTNER

Our retired “senior citizen” owls, Alice and Iris the Great Horned Owls, got their bills and talons trimmed last week (this is called “coping”). Their pointy parts don’t get as much wear and tear as they would in the wild so we have to use a Dremel and dog toenail clipper to help keep things in shape.

Side view of Alice. Her beak is pointed to the ceiling and being trimmed by a Dremel. Her face is obscured by a hand in the foreground holding her head steady while another hand does the trimming. If Alice fears this rotary tool, she keeps it hidden. It's a coping mechanism.
Using the rotary tool to take the long tip off Alice’s bill
Same angle but no longer obscured by human hands, Alice turns to the camera to express herself, fully. Her mouth is wide and she looks IRATE. A second person's forearms enters the frame to brace either side of Alice's torso with the towel.
Ready to bite. (She did score a nice puncture on Karla’s hand)

Alice is 28 years old now, retired, with arthritis, significant cataracts, and atherosclerosis. But she is still spunky!!

Another (!) set of hands, this time restraining Alice's ankles. Three people are involved in this process, four if you count the photographer. Attached to said ankles are fuzzy feet, each clenched in a ball showcasing Alice's impressive talons. Also impressive is her plumage in stripes of black and white.
Alice’s talons, trimmed down. She doesn’t go outside or bathe as much as before, so the outer layers aren’t flaking off as much as they used to. Alice has stripes on the feathers on her toes, unlike the majority of owls in this area.
Similar photo, different owl, years apart. This is Iris. She too is on her back, similarly baring stripes of black and white, with pair of hands restraining her torso and ankles for her pedicure. A lime green towel wraps her, but this one has a hood. "We like to use the kids' hooded towels," says Karla Bloem (exec. director), "so we can cover their heads while working on their feet to keep them calmer." The hood is decorated with the face of a smiling frog, eyes bulging from the top.
Restraining Iris the Great Horned Owl. We use hooded towels so we can easily cover her head so she is slightly less stressed when we aren’t working on her bill. She probably isn’t actually smiling under the smiley frog hood…
A yellow eye peers at the camera from within the grellow frog hood. Dremel and canine-grade toenail clippers sit on the bench behind. In contrast to the previous photo, the humans have decided to wear thick gloves. Probably a wise move.
Holding Iris’s feet
Close up of Iris, shot from below examining her freshly trimmed beak. She's all whiskers. From this angle we see the roof of her open mouth. A finger points below her chin, and Iris looks up at the owner with an expression that would appear without context to be adoration, but we know can only be fuuurious anger at having to go through all this again.
Iris’s bill, in process
Iris is on her back, pictured from above with the frog-towel below (and a heating pad below that). Her right eye, heretofore unseen, is damaged from an injury she sustained back in 2006, which landed her in rehab at Raptor Education Group, Antigo WI. The distortion to her vision meant she was deemed better suited to captivity than the wild, and here we are.
You can see just how wonky her right eye is from the original puncture to her eye that landed her in rehab at the Raptor Education Group in Antigo, WI back in 2006

Alice bites, fights and screams, while Iris almost holds her mouth open for us as if she knows it will get over faster if she doesn’t struggle. Both old ladies are put under once a year for radiographs by The Raptor Center, and it is much easier to cope them at that time. But their bills and talons grow enough that they need trims between their annual visits…something that neither owls nor staff look forward to.

Link to donate to International Owl Center for those willing and able.

xo owlsintowels

💛🦉

SpeciesCommon NameMore info
Bubo virginianusGreat Horned OwlWiki link

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