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!

  • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
    1·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • piwakawakas@lemmy.nz
      2·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        6 days ago

        I found this little post that discusses this in a far fewer words than I could! 😅

        Owls are “eyes and ears on wings”. That brain cavity above is about the size of a large peanut. Two-thirds of the owl brain is devoted to sight and hearing. Of the one-third that is left, about 75% of it is devoted to hard-wired instinct and lower functions. That leaves a tiny little sliver for learning which is mostly taken up by remembering good hunting grounds and hunting strategies that work.

        Owls are not social creatures like parrots or crows, so they don’t need a lot of cerebral cortex. Think of them as the sharks of the sky. Very good at what they do (hunt, see, hear and reproduce). Mediocre at everything else.

        Geoffey Widdison, also a quoran, asks why we associate owls with intelligence and wisdom and decides "the most likely reason is that they have large depressions around their eyes (which, ironically, are apparently there to direct sound more than to help vision), and that makes them look ‘intelligent and deliberative’ to humans. In other words, not only are we judging by appearance, we’re judging another species on something that has no connection to the quality we attribute to it. (We’re ‘anthropomorphising’).

        Which suggests that, while owls aren’t especially bright, neither are we

        • piwakawakas@lemmy.nz
          2·
          6 days ago

          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

          • anon6789@lemmy.worldOP
            2·
            6 days ago

            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.

            • piwakawakas@lemmy.nz
              2·
              6 days ago

              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