That’s one smart bird imho Two peregrine falcons attacked the horned owl and she escaped by diving into Lake Michigan. Then* swims to shore*. Clever bird totally avoids the predators.
poor thing looks pooped resting on the shore. I guess she forgot swimming is an aerobic exercise. 
Water fowl like ducks are adapted to the water. Its surprising an owl could swim this distance.
throws the red flag on “across Lake Michigan”
You can’t even see across Lake Michigan and the distance to the horizon isn’t even a good start on swimming all the way across. They watched it come under attack. It then came ashore on the coast that they were on. Awesome story but the owl clearly didn’t swim across the lake. I can give the Daily Mail at least a little bit of a pass. Lake Michigan is more roughly comparable to the size of Scotland than what the writers would typically associate with a lake. A little fact checking would be nice though.
I assumed the bird was just a few hundred feet offshore. Can’t take “across the lake” to literally.
I thought owls were nocturnal? Why was this one out in the daylight?
Primarily, not exclusively. You will occasionally see Great Horned Owls out and about and hunting in the daytime. Note that predation can both ways on this one - they have been known to take falcons as well. They’re probably the least specialized raptor in North America - they will kill and eat just about anything in a wide size range.
Don’t bother giving the Fail a synapse worth of latitude about facts; they’re so well-known for being inaccurate you’ll see many of their articles have no byline and are merely captioned pictures w/ the captions repeated under every picture through the entire page. Nothing to do w/ the UK/US divide, I believe they write using talk-to-text while reading aloud from other websites; most especially TMZ, from the looks of it.
**aceplace **is our resident Daily Fail synopsis reposter. Dunno why they didn’t pick the Christian Science Monitor or Voice of America news sites to repost constantly but there it is.
Evading Predators, Scared Owl Swims in Lake Michigan doesn’t have that ZING of clickbait verbiage.