Owl Coloring Pages

Cute owl coloring pages

The five easy pages have big shapes and few lines, which suits preschoolers. A kawaii owl sits in a teacup covered in hearts, and a big owl face is mostly two huge round eyes above rows of scalloped chest feathers. Three fluffy owlets squeeze into a nest while one of them sleeps, an owl in a bobble hat and a zigzag scarf waves among the snowflakes, and a wise owl in round glasses reads a book on top of a pile of books.

How owls live

There are more than two hundred kinds of owl, and a baby owl is called an owlet. Many owls do not build nests at all but raise their young in a hole in a tree, like the family on one page, where a parent and two owlets peer out of the hollow while the other parent keeps watch from the branch above. Young owls often leave the nest before they can really fly and clamber about on nearby branches, flapping hard — which is what the owlet learning to fly is doing. Burrowing owls live underground instead, in burrows dug by prairie dogs or ground squirrels in the grasslands and deserts of the Americas, and unlike most owls they are often out in daylight: two stand guard on their mound while a third peeks out of the burrow.

Silent hunters

An owl’s eyes are shaped like tubes and cannot move in their sockets, so it turns its whole head instead — as far as 270 degrees. A barn owl’s heart-shaped face works like a dish that gathers sound, and it can find a mouse in total darkness by hearing alone, while the soft fringed edges of its feathers make its flight almost silent. The barn owl page shows one swooping low over tall grass with a mouse hiding below. The “horns” of the great horned owl are only tufts of feathers; its ears are hidden on the sides of its head.

Owls in stories

The owl has stood for wisdom since ancient Athens, where the little owl belonged to Athena, goddess of wisdom, and was stamped on the city’s coins — which is why the wise owl reads a book and the owl graduate holds a diploma. In Edward Lear’s poem The Owl and the Pussy-cat, published in 1871, the two go to sea in a pea-green boat, and on that page the owl plays a small guitar while the cat holds the honey and the money. Three more pages are small stories of their own: an owl in a bow tie pouring tea for a hedgehog, an owl with a lantern leading a mouse, a rabbit and a hedgehog along a forest path, and an owl sitting in the web of a dreamcatcher.

Detailed owl coloring pages for adults

The six detailed pages suit coloured pencils and fine markers. The great horned owl is drawn realistically on a pine branch, every feather its own shape; the stained glass owl perches in an arched window under a crescent moon; the folk art owl carries a tulip on its chest and hearts on its wings; the steampunk owl wears goggles and a top hat, with a clock on its chest and gears inside one wing; the enchanted forest owl sits in front of a tree house and toadstool cottages; and the doodle page packs owls, acorns, oak leaves, books and a lantern around one big owl face.

More owls around the site

Looking for a snowy owl? There is one in the winter coloring pages and another in the January coloring pages. There is also an owl mandala among the mandala coloring pages, and a patterned owl with the parrot, the peacock and the eagle in the bird coloring pages.

Print the whole set at once

The button at the top of this page bundles all twenty into a single download, so you can print the lot for a class or a rainy afternoon rather than picking through them one at a time. Every page comes as a PDF in both US Letter and A4.