Silent killing machine: interesting facts about owls (19 photos)

The owl, dear friends, is perhaps the most ideally adapted predator from the bird world for aerial hunting. She has probably mastered all the continents except Antarctica.





It is usually mistakenly believed that the owl is short-legged. But no, this bird’s legs are quite long, like those of a good fashion model. Just well hidden behind the plumage. Such a shy girl hides her legs!



Usually, people associate the owl with a certain wisdom and learning. It was in this capacity that the owl appeared in the program “What-Where-When”.

But in fact, the owl's brain is extremely small (possibly due to its large eyes). This, I am not afraid to say, is one of the most poorly trained birds in the world. However, an owl doesn’t really need to learn anything extra. He can do everything he needs in life. Maybe this is where true wisdom lies?





What is our life... A game!

The eyes of an owl are huge binocular night vision devices that not a single mouse can slip past. But the owl, due to the complexity of its eyes, can only look directly with its eyes - it cannot squint with its purple eye at all.



Don't be scared, citizens, it's just an owl's skull :)

To look to the side, an owl needs to turn its entire head. What, however, our heroine learned to do masterfully - her head, due to the special arrangement of the vertebrae and blood vessels, rotates as much as 270 degrees! That is, our feathered heroine is really capable of looking behind her back :)



The owl also has incredibly developed hearing. But also with a certain joke. The owl does not hear loud sounds very well, as if it cuts them off. But the owl is able to detect the slightest mouse pee-pee-pee.



The ears of an owl are not a sheep sneezing...

Most owl species are fully equipped with true stealth technology. That is, they are able, thanks to a special sound-absorbing border on the feathers, to fly absolutely silently.

It is no coincidence that the owl has such a round face, like an old Russian beauty. This shape of the owl's facial disc is a kind of cross between a satellite dish and a radar, which allows the widow owl to detect prey signals even better.



The feathered “ears” (“horns”) of some species of owls are, according to one version, an excellent way for camouflage in the area.



An owl is one of the few birds that can get wet. And all because the predator once sacrificed the water resistance of its plumage to silent flight. Photos of wet owls, frozen and miserable, instantly become truly stellar on the Internet :)



The owl is not particularly good at building its own nests. But he is happy to carry out raider attacks, settling in the abandoned apartments of other birds. Or even in animal burrows - and this happens.

Our heroine breeds 2 offspring at once during the season - one after the other. Moreover, older owlets usually look after the younger ones while their parents fly hunting. But in case of severe hunger, nannies can eat little brothers and sisters without any problems.



Gray owl in a nest with owlets

Owls are incredibly keen to protect their nests with their chicks. They can attack with their claws the head of any suspicious type that happens to be close to their beloved children.

Contrary to myth, owls can see during the day. Only half of them lead an openly nocturnal antisocial lifestyle. In general, in fact, owls like to hunt not so much at night as at dawn or dusk, when their victims see the worst and are most relaxed.



By the way, an owl can hunt a wide variety of animal species - from small insects and birds and mice to quite large foxes or hares.



At the same time, her hunting feature is that the owl does not like to fly over the forest for hours in vain, tracking down random prey. She just sits on a tree, carefully examining and listening to the surrounding area. And only if the squeak of the poor doomed mouse has burned, then it flies into a bandit raid. Most of the owl's victims do not even have time to understand who attacked them and from where.



By the way, not all owls hoot. The same barn owls prefer to simply hiss loudly. There are also species of owls that emit a shrill, horse-like neigh.



And yes, the owl is not the owl’s wife at all. The eagle owl is a special subspecies of owl. An eagle owl is usually much larger than an ordinary owl, it flies less silently, and it certainly has those same “ears-horns” that not every owl has.

One of the most frightening birds in the world is the great eagle owl. When you accidentally meet this half-meter black-eyed gray brother, you will really believe in the supernatural. Fortunately, this living ghost is found only on the outskirts of forests in Africa. Where it extremely frightens the local natives with its hoots.



The pale eagle owl is so pale

The smallest owl in the world is the cactus elf owl, which lives in the southern United States and Mexico. The body length of this bird is only 12-15 cm, weight is about 50 grams.



The little cactus, fortunately, does not eat, not a mouse

One of the world's largest owls is the majestic queen of the Russian taiga, the great gray owl, whose wingspan can reach 160 cm.



However, in ancient times there were much larger owls. For example, Ornimegalonyx, which lived in Cuba 10 thousand years ago. He couldn’t fly, but he reached a length of as much as 120 cm and a weight of 30 kg. And he happily ran after prey on his long legs. A kind of ostrich owl the size of a five-year-old child.



The rarest owl in the world, the fish owl, by the way, lives only in Russia. Lives in the Norsky Nature Reserve in the Far East. There are only about 400 pairs.