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July 31 - August 25, 2024
Some owls migrate but not like other birds, and not in predictable patterns.
Can owls help us determine the role of REM sleep in brain development in both birds and humans? Do owls talk in their sleep?
Owls are not only cryptic, guarded, and secretive, they’re also dissidents and iconoclasts, rule breakers.
Owls first appeared on earth during the Paleocene epoch, some fifty-five million to sixty-five million years ago.
new research shows that owls are most closely related not to falcons or nightjars but to a group of day-active birds that includes toucans, trogons, hoopoes, hornbills, woodpeckers, kingfishers, and bee-eaters.
Being near her somehow made me feel smaller in my body and bigger in my soul.
A few other kinds of birds, like nightjars, potoos, and frogmouths, hunt large flying insects in night skies. But no other bird hunts mammals and other birds at night the way owls do.
barn owls can hunt their prey in complete darkness using only sound.
The facial disk in owls that hunt primarily by sound is outlined with a ruff, or ring of stiff interlocking feathers that capture sound waves and channel them toward the ears, like people cupping their hands around their ears.
An owl’s auditory system shares with other birds another superpower we mammals don’t possess: it doesn’t age.
owls, like other birds, have the capacity to regenerate their hair cells, keeping their hearing keen throughout life.
To be able to hunt by sound alone, owls need not only supersensitive ears but also the ability to locate the source of a faint noise in three-dimensional space—sometimes
The resulting auditory map allows owls to “see” the world in two dimensions with their ears.
Over evolutionary time, it seems, owls made a kind of sensory trade-off. They lost some of the genes involved in daylight and color vision. But their genes for nocturnal vision were enhanced and refined.
Because feathers tend to make a lot of noise, the quiet flight of owls is all the more remarkable.
Not every owl is plush and soundless on the wing. The tool kit for quiet flight varies from species to species. Owls that depend less on hearing when they hunt, such as Mountain Pygmy Owls, have noisier flight. The Great Gray Owl has the most extreme traits related to quiet flight. It has the thickest velvet, one of the longest leading-edge combs, and possibly the most extensive vane fringes of any owl.
Snow is frozen water, and it bends sound.
They don’t just hoot for the hell of it. They vocalize for a reason, and they convey meaning in their calls.”
owls as a group have high individuality compared with other animals, says Linhart. This makes sense given the role of sound communication in their lives.
Because Little Owls are sedentary—they don’t migrate—and have stable territories that they occupy long term, they’re a perfect model species for studying acoustic signature identification,
Do you know ‘Continuum’ by György Ligeti?” she asks me. “It’s a piece for harpsichord, and the musical tension is amazing because of the small intervals and variations. Eurasian Eagle Owl vocalizations are like that. The differences in hoots can be minimal, but they’re there, and they fill me with wonder. Just the way music does.”
“I became very interested in reading spectrograms because they’re really the music scores of nature,” says Savelsberg.
“It’s such a rewarding way to monitor owls. Knowing the unique sounds of individual owl voices means that you can accurately monitor them without having to capture or trap them and put transmitters on them, so you don’t have to disturb them or cause them stress.
“If you want soap opera,” she says, “just learn individual recognition of eagle owls.”
This developmental pattern—a long juvenile period before becoming independent from parents—is considered by some scientists a prerequisite for intelligence in birds.
Even more surprising, Savelsberg spotted a pair of adult eagle owls adopting an owlet, a six-month-old juvenile that was completely unrelated to them.
Sometimes the only way to see this is to listen.
Northern Pygmy Owls are small, brown, round-headed woodland owls, secretive, solitary, and typically quiet, except during the breeding season, when their vocalizations come alive.
I can see why these owls are known as “glaring gnomes.” They even glare from behind, or so it seems. On the back of the Northern Pygmy Owl’s head is a pair of dark, white-ringed feathered eyespots, “false eyes” that are quite convincing. For years it was thought these eyespots functioned solely to confuse predators, but research suggests they may also confound mobbing songbirds.
“We’re so used to the idea that females want to mate with the big guys. But that’s not the case with Burrowing Owls. And as we’re finding out, it’s not the case with other owl species as well.”
Why would owls pick mates their own size? It has to do with energetics, says Johnson. “It’s only advantageous to be big during a good food year. If it’s not a good food year, it’s better to be smaller because you need less energy to succeed.”
Most owls don’t construct their own nests at all, but rather they appropriate structures built by other animals.
Scientists have found that nestlings with live-in blind snakes grow 50 percent faster and experience lower mortality than broods lacking serpentine company.
In other birds, each half of the brain receives input from the opposite eye. In owls, each hemisphere receives visual input from both eyes.
When master falconer Rodney Stotts, who works with a Eurasian Eagle Owl and other raptors, was asked what it felt like to develop a connection with such glorious birds, he said, “There hasn’t been a word created for that feeling. That bird lands on your hand, and you’re just going to cry from the emotions that run through you. You realize how small we are and how small our problems are.”
Imprinting on a member of its own species helps a baby bird learn and interpret species-specific behaviors and vocalizations so it can choose appropriate mates later in life.
Of the three possible outcomes for an owl at the center, this one, becoming an ambassador or education bird, is the smallest bucket, says Nicholson, “but it’s the one that has taught us the most about the inner lives of these birds and how to read their behavior.”
“Owls, on the other hand, are subtle in showing what they’re thinking, and you have to be in tune with them to read their behaviors.
owls are individuals. They have different personalities
if there’s a choice between safety and food, owls will choose safety.
owls have emotions.
in small owls, “the flight response is a freeze response because they depend on camouflage to hide,”
Training is a conversation between trainer and owl to help it control its own environment. It’s about doing things on the bird’s terms.
In many cases, the “reading” of owls is related to a sophisticated understanding of ecological relationships, and the birds may well be providing essential information about the environment.
Living things aren’t supposed to be able to walk through walls, or to appear and disappear without integral motion. Owls seem to break those rules and defy expectations. That’s part of why we put them into a supernatural category.”
Ibarra focuses on the concept of biocultural memory, the idea that human cultural practices and beliefs grow out of observations of the natural world, and that our memories are a result of these interactions between cultural traits and our environment.
“Owls have a lot to say about biocultural memory,”
Owls see what we don’t see. Hear what we don’t hear. Invite us to notice sights and sounds that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Owls teach us what we can learn from an animal just by listening to it.
“We speculate that the owl’s ability to hunt and navigate in nearly-complete darkness is made possible, in part, by an exceptional hippocampal-based spatial memory.”
