You’ve waited for it, and now it is here: your 2025 OotY lineup!
There look to be many competitive races right off the bat. There’s an amazing assortment of owl type from around the globe, and in the third year, we’ve really refined the list of owls down to some of the best. Both halves of the bracket seem balanced, and no owl has what I feel is an easy path forward. This may be our best tournament ever!
My goal is to start the games Monday Dec 1 with White Face / Buff Fronted and Spectacled / Black and White.
In the meanwhile, take a look at the bracket and tell me which matches have you excited/anxious. Which are going to be the toughest for you? Who has the best chance of winning? Do you see one who you think is going to come out of nowhere? Will Saw Whet or White Face win again, or are we going to see a new champ crowned? Whatever your thoughts, let’s hear them!
They don’t look to be officially sanctioned, but they don’t seem to be too aggressively monitored either. I watched the animated movie for The Wyrd Sisters the other week after finishing that, and that video says it’s been up for 12 years. If you’re just looking to see if you like the humor, it’s a quick way anyone can access.
As a side note, I was randomly scrolling All when I came across this post.
I was slightly confused to see an owl match up in a super bowl community, but thought that’s cool though.
Having actually scrolled through some more posts, all about owls, I realised that the community is instead superb owls >. < feeling a little silly, but I subscribed hoping to see more owls <3
It is a carryover joke/pun/wordplay from Reddit. I wasn’t totally thrilled it carried over since non-sports people and those who aren’t Americans often don’t get it and skip/block us, confusing it with American football.
As you’ve seen, we’re all about owls here! A lot of it comes from me, mainly just because I think they’re neat, but after doing so many posts on them here, I started working at a wild animal rescue once a week, where I’m sometimes lucky enough to get to work with them in person. So I’m not expert, but I do spend a bit of time learning about them and have some hands on time with them.
I will make sure you see tons of great owls from around the globe, learn all the things that make them special, their unique anatomy, and the latest and greatest in owl news and research. Once a year, we also hold Owl of the Year, basically just for fun and to freshen up the community banner and icon, but it also lets me know what you all are into or not into.
If you ever have questions, just ask! I love replying to everyone and will teach you all you want to know about these great animals.
That’s cool, awesome you can give something back to what you love.
Owls are definitely pretty cool animals, I’ll look forward to seeing further posts!
It is more fun than I could have imagined!
And while I have not yet met a Ruru in person yet, I did happen to run into an Australian Boobook near me, and got the opportunity to hold it for a bit.
I thought my mind was playing tricks on me when I saw it. I am roughly between New York City and Washington DC in the US, so an Australian owl was not something I ever expected to see here, let alone interact with. I did think it was Ruru at first, but there are a lot of types of Boobook owls, and I did not expect to see any of them here, but it was one of the huge highlights of this year for me.
A quick wiki tells me that they were considered the same species until recently. It does look remarkably similar.
I don’t imagine that it would be there naturally (although I’m very unfamiliar with import of animals into the states nor migration patterns of owls if they have them. Although I do know barn owls made it to NZ from Oz so maybe I’m just blissfully unaware) so I imagine it was introduced at some point?
Its actually bigger than I thought.
Where I live, it’s quite common to hear Rurus calling not long after dark. Some of the screeches they make are not at all like their name
Affordable genetic testing is really opening up a lot of new info about owls, so even though we’ve been fascinated with them since our earliest days, we are still currently learning so many new things about them thanks to modern tech that makes studying them so much easier. Owl classifications can get messy, but it’s proof we’re still learning so much!
It was a little larger than I had expected as well, but it was still almost weightless. Owls are 40-60 percent feathers by volume, and even the part that is bird is as hollow as possible.
I don’t know exactly how it got where I was. It was an event for an animal rescue group, and I went to see their new Snowy Owl, but a lot of the birds there were actually bred in captivity to serve as educational animals, and this is likely one of those, otherwise I likely wouldn’t have been able to handle it, as if it were a rescue, we generally try to give them the last amount of time around humans as possible so they don’t start to get tamed.
Owls can have pretty large vocabularies! Some studies show they can have up to 2 or 3 dozen unique vocalizations and that they can determine the “voices” of different owls, at least to the point they can tell if it is an acquaintance or a stranger they should investigate.
Our resident Great Horned Owl at the clinic is very grumpy and he makes all kinds of noises to show his dissatisfaction well beyond his trademark hoot. 😄
Seeing the skeleton of an owl is a game-changer for realising how much of them is floof!
That’s pretty cool that they are able to recognise others owls based on their calls. I guess they’re not called wise for nothing.
Do you know how their intelligence compares to corvids or parrots?
Apparently NZ has 3 species of owls. I wasn’t aware we had a small population of Small (Athena) owls in the south island.
Yes, they’re very different without those feathers! 😁
Owls are smart enough to be great owls, but they’ve given up brain size to make room for bigger eyes. Their eyes aren’t round, more shaped like a light bulb, and it fills up a lot of the skull. You can see the back of many owls’ eyes through their ears! So the wisdom is all just mythology and they aren’t thought of by biologists as particularly intelligent like corvids or parrots.
I forgot about the Little Owls! They got a lift over from the Germans though and not through their own ingenuity.
Awesome, thanks, I’ll check it out