See an image that represents tecolotl in the Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs, ed. Stephanie Wood (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities, 2020-present).
TECOLŌ-TL, onomatopoetic, Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) [FC: 42 Tecolotl] “It is round, like a ball. The back is rounded. The eyes are like spindle whorls; shiny. It has horns of feathers. The head is ball-like, round; the feathers thick, heavy. It is blinded during the day. It is born in crags, in trees. It feeds by night, because it sees especially well in the dark. It has a deep voice when it hoots; it says, tecolo, tecolo, o, o.” A fine description of a Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), particularly, the vocalizations. This term might apply more widely to a variety of owl species within its extended range. May be generalized to a variety of owl species.
Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain; Book 11 – Earthly Things, no. 14, Part XII, eds. and transl. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe and Salt Lake City: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1963); and, with quotation selections, synthesis, and analysis here also appearing in E. S. Hunn, "The Aztec Fascination with Birds: Deciphering Sixteenth-Century Sources," unpublished manuscript, 2022, cited here with permission.
Entered Spanish as tecolote.
no yuan yn youaltotome yn chichiquatin yn tetecolo, yn tzinacame yuan occequintin yn tetzauhtõtóme, youaltica quiça = and also the birds of the night, the barn owls, the horned owls, the bats, and the other ominous birds, at night they go out (late sixteenth century, Central Mexico)
Louise M. Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature, Institute for Mesoamerican Studies Monograph 13 (Albany: University at Albany, 2001), 27.
ytoca tecullotl = named Tecolotl (gender unclear) (Cuernavaca region, ca. 1540s)
The Book of Tributes: Early Sixteenth-Century Nahuatl Censuses from Morelos, ed. and transl. S. L. Cline, (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1993), 140–141.
tetecolo (the reduplicative plural form)
Antonio Rincón, Arte mexicana: Vocbulario breve, que solamente contiene todas las dicciones ue en esta arte se traen por exemplos (1595), 5r.
antonio tecolotl (Tepetlaoztoc, sixteenth century)
Barbara J. Williams and H. R. Harvey, The Códice de Santa María Asunción: Facsimile and Commentary: Households and Lands in Sixteenth-Century Tepetlaoztoc (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 79, 113.
dio tecolotl = Diego Tecolotl(a person's name; the glyph next to the gloss of the name shows the face of the devil in the shape of an owl, plus a stone; the extra "tetl" from stone is a bit redundant) (Tepetlaoztoc, sixteenth century)
Barbara J. Williams and H. R. Harvey, The Códice de Santa María Asunción: Facsimile and Commentary: Households and Lands in Sixteenth-Century Tepetlaoztoc (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1997), 102–103.