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July 9 - July 20, 2024
owl’s brain uses math to pinpoint its prey. Who knew.
This officially makes owls smarter than me.
“If anyone knows anything about anything,” says Winnie-the-Pooh, “it’s Owl who knows something about something.”
Owls first appeared on earth during the Paleocene epoch, some fifty-five million to sixty-five million years ago. Tens of millions of years later, they split into two families, Tytonidae (barn owls) and Strigidae (all other owls).
That owl seemed like a messenger from another time and place, like starlight. Being near her somehow made me feel smaller in my body and bigger in my soul.
This is what it's all about. You know you're in the right spot when you experience this- most often times in nature.
An owl like this will eat an astounding 250 to 350 possums a year, nearly one a day.
Powerful owl
This remarkable ability to move indigestible food up and out, against the usual direction, is called “antiperistalsis.” Pterosaurs, those flying predators of the dinosaur era, could do it, too.
Did NOT know that. Makes sense.
most have long, well-muscled legs, up to half the length of their bodies,
an owl weighing less than a pound pouncing on a mouse can exert force equivalent to 150 times the weight of its prey.
They can hold that grip without tiring thanks to a system of tendons in their feet
An owl’s auditory system shares with other birds another superpower we mammals don’t possess: it doesn’t age.
azimuth (or horizontal location)
Where azimuth and elevation intersect is where he directs his strike.
Owls have exactly twice as many neck vertebrae as humans do, giving them that much more flexibility.
Most birds have a retina dominated by cones, cells that work best in bright light to help with color detection. The retinas of owls are packed with rods, which are much more sensitive to light and movement.
The lighter colored parts of feathers weigh up to 5 percent less than the adjacent dark portions.
David Johnson and a team of volunteers counted every feather on a dead female Great Horned Owl—a labor involving forty-six hours of work—they came up with 12,230 individual feathers. Eagles and most other birds of prey have about half as many.
Whoa.
the sounds that many owls make when they fly are so faint
Owls may not be silent fliers, but they are nearly so. In part this is because owls have low wing loading—their wings are big in relation to their bodies—so their flight is buoyant and slow, as slow as five miles per hour for a big bird like a barn owl, which makes it quieter. (Owls need to fly slowly to stalk prey in open fields and to navigate through trees and other obstacles in forests.) But it’s the marvelous and unique feathers and structure of owls’ wings that really hush their flight.
“In science, we love putting things into binary opposition, but the truth is both functions likely play a part.”
I appreciate this- it's seldom ever one thing that drives something .
fossorial
Burrowing
“These are some of the places that have been the most environmentally stable for the longest period of time, millions of years,” he says. “They’re also geographically varied, with different habitats.” They’re mostly in tropical regions that never experienced glaciation.
This makes tremendous sense.
So it’s these two conditions, stability of climate and landscape and variety of topography, that have allowed owls to diversify in these regions.”
there are two important days in life, the day you were born and the day you find out why.
During the nesting season, the feathers of males bleach out in the sun as they stand guard over the nest.
They don’t just hoot for the hell of it.
Hooting, fluffing, mutual preening, feeding. This is mostly what goes on in the pairing of owls.
“Large forest owls make a really obvious grieving noise when they’ve lost a chick,” she says. “And they did the same thing for this tree hollow. It was quite heart-wrenching.”
The females in most species of owls start incubating as soon as they lay an egg. Not a female pygmy owl.
Only birds that lay in places hidden from view have white eggs—woodpeckers, bee-eaters, kingfishers, owls.
