Image courtesy of Alabama Ag Extension
Owls have captured the imagination of humans for thousands of years, apparently striking fear, or at the very least a kind of reverence into our hearts. For centuries, Native cultures across the world have crafted this reverence into stories where owls embody restless spirits of the dead, or are harbingers of death, or (my personal favorite) consume the spirits of the dead and carry them into the afterlife.
This reverence could be explained by their increased activity at night or perhaps their near-silent flight. To me though, owls live their lives above us in every way, and we seem to know that. In a literal sense, they nest in tree cavities or abandoned nests typically 20-40 feet off the ground, well above eye level. Energetically though, I have never seen an owl before an owl saw me. Every time, I am shocked into silence, wondering how long it’s been watching me and what it knows that I don’t.
Owls, fundamentally, are masters of sound. Virtually all of their highly specialized adaptations revolve around minimizing the sound they make and interpreting the sonic landscape around them with startling accuracy.
In terms of reducing their own noise, they have specialized flight feathers that are extra flexible and fluffy at the edges. This extra softness makes all the difference– allowing air to pass over them with hardly any turbulence and virtually no noise. I know from personal experience how eerie this ‘adaptation’ is. As I wandered along the woods skirting a small stream at dusk a couple years ago, a barred owl appeared suddenly six feet right above my head, swooping low over me and coming to a noiseless landing on a branch only ten yards away. The total stillness it immediately settled into left me wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing or if this creature was merely a figment of my imagination. Barred owls also disappear into tree canopy easily due to their feather patterning: brown and white feathers streaking vertically on their chest like bark, with horizontal bands across their neck (like a cozy scarf) and lining their back.
Perhaps their most unique adaptation is their specialized ability to locate exactly where a sound is coming from, both on horizontal and vertical planes. In some species of owl, their ears have evolved a kind of asymmetry– with their left ear canal slightly higher and angled up, and their right ear canal lower and angled down. Rotating their heads at all sorts of strange angles, they hone in on where exactly their prey are.
Amazingly, experiments have shown that barn owls can pinpoint the exact location of a tiny mouse from over 30 feet away. They fly to where the mouse last made a noise, and it’s not until they are hovering directly over the mouse that they have a strong need for their vision at all. In fact, their color vision isn’t very good, as they opt for better sensitivity in low-light conditions instead. This low-light vision is the largely the reason they hunt at dusk and dawn, when the gap between their visual acuity and that of their prey’s is widest.
Apparently, these adaptations allow them to settle down and stay put. Barred owls don’t migrate. One study showed that of 158 banded birds, none of them moved any farther away than 6 miles from their original location. Barred owls love large swaths of mature forests, ideally close to water- the most likely place to find the wide variety of prey they eat: mice, rabbits, birds, squirrels, birds, frogs, snakes- you name it. They also need mature forest because they’d rather let other species do their home-building leg work; when they locate a tree cavity or old nest and take up residence, they often do very little, if anything to improve it. Originally a bird of eastern North America, during the twentieth century owls spread out Northwest and then south into California. Likely, their territorial expansion was hindered by wildfires and logging. Because of their need for old-growth forests, they are an indicator species for forest management.
Barred owls feel above me in every sense of the word- settled, patient, their own simple needs hidden inside their motionless bodies. Driven by silence, stillness, and listening, they seem like avian monks, disentangling with ease what’s necessary from what’s not, avoiding any frivolous action or effort. Waiting in watchful contentment, responding only to the demands of each moment.