Attacked on Night Run

I was running along the neighbourhood streets around Marguerite and 37th Ave in Shaughnessy at around 1am.  It's a very poorly lit area at night, the lights few and far between and not the brightest.  The odd person here and there I'd notice every so often, but most of the time I was running alone, listening to an audio book (David Allen's Getting Things Done, an excellent life-management program), minding my own business when completely out of the blue something hits my head and quickly rips along the right half of my head from front to back...

I let out what i guess you'd call a startled roar, and turned around immediately...

nothing there. 

Dark, empty street.  I turn off David Allen. 

Silence.

My skin was crawling, heart going a mile a minute, partially from running but getting clobbered by something that large but yet completely unseen played its part!  At first I thought perhaps it could have been a bat, but then it would have to be one freakishly enormous bat for around here.  A person?  Don't see anyone, but if they were just behind one of those bushes and swung out, then I wouldn't see them now.  But why do that and then hide?  That didn't make sense either.  I knew this would eat at me unless I figured it out.

So I made myself walk back, slowly preparing to fight my imagined attacker, and after awhile i noticed the silhouette of a fairly large... owl!? a few inches shy of two feet tall perhaps.  I've never even seen a damn owl in the city before.  I was still pretty freaked out so I let off some steam by really roaring at it.  It didn't like that so much apparently, and proceeded to swoop continuously at my head while I ducked and swung my fist blindly upwards at it... Left me alone when i'd made my way ducking and walking backwards/sideways a fair bit away from where it was originally. 

I'm thinking a nest in the area.  But as Veronica pointed out, it's the wrong time of year for that.  Young?  Or perhaps owls are just territorial?

For people who play World of Warcraft, WoW was somewhere in the back of my head during this... I just did all those howling fjord hunting raven quests in the game too.  Frost nova would have been so useful.