The Arduino can be used to locate sounds. But a lot may depend on what sound you are trying to locate and in what environment. Locating a human voice in a noisy environment would be a completely different task to locating a pre-determined signal at a known frequency in a quiet location.
Here is a good article on how humans and other animals locate sounds.
If you have four microphones around the owl and the owl acustically shades each microphone from sound coming from behind it, then, in a quiet room, I imagine you could get within 45degrees of the source just using volume.
Owls cannot move their eyes (the muscles required would be too large) so they have to rotate their heads.
If you had an InfraRed sensor that might then fine tune you onto the target, but again it depends on the environment e.g. radiators or other hot spots.