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!
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.
Huh, interesting. I didn’t realise their eyes were quite so oddly shaped. I imagine maximising their rods to pick up as much light as possible.
I found this little post that discusses this in a far fewer words than I could! 😅
I was wondering how they have good hearing if they don’t have an external ear, but it mentioned towards the end that the eyes kind of work like that. It’s quite fascinating. I didn’t realise that they had good hearing, but I guess it makes sense that they do.
Also interesting that social creatures have a higher brain capacity. Which makes sense when I think about it, but also not something that had clicked for me.
I’m not sure octopi are social, but I know they are intelligent, but nothing else is jumping out at me as not being social but intelligent
Read this post about the history of how we learned about owl hearing when you get a chance. This is a super famous study by a super famous biologist. For many owls, their ears make their eyes seem like toys! Many owls have unique 3D-like hearing that can pinpoint prey in total darkness. Truly amazing stuff, and I wrote this breakdown of the study a while back to try and simplify their experiments.
That’s a great summary.
I did find the bit about saying asymmetrical acoustics developing several times a bit strange as that’s morelike how convergent evolution works rather than speciation works. But from the little I’ve read, owls are all genetically related, so those two things don’t quite square to me.
Not that I’m an evolution expert, just find it interesting