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owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 4:35 pm
by makc
meh

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 6:33 pm
by owlice
WOW! Thank you! You're right; I DO like that site, and I had no idea it existed! Thank you for posting it!!!!

My nearest owl (at the moment) is listed as being at the nearest Zoo, and an owl I've never seen (a Burrowing Owl) was listed as the second nearest. (My Owlet is actually the closest owl, as he is downstairs ignoring schoolwork almost as well as I am. :D ) I have several times heard Barred Owls when walking or biking on the C&O Canal towpath (I did a through trip of the C&O last fall) but I've never seen one there. Barred Owl:
owl2.jpeg
owl2.jpeg (9.25 KiB) Viewed 9709 times
A friend and I were birding in the San Joaquin Valley (CA) and had an owl (a Barn Owl) almost fly through the open car window, which was very cool (cooler still that he didn't, and instead perched on a fence post so we could take pictures of him). It was the middle of the afternoon; we certainly hadn't expected to see an owl! We were looking particularly for Sandhill Cranes. I've seen a couple of Great Horned Owls (my avatar is a Great Horned) in the wild, including one sitting out in the open in the median of a highway during daylight; I almost ran off the road when I spotted him! (Usually the coolest bird I see in that median is a Red-tailed Hawk.)

Um, yeah. Maybe that's enough about owls from me...!

Thank you!!

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 6:47 pm
by makc
I think someone said that owls are very stupid birds (as opposed to crows or parrots), why such a sympathy?

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 7:17 pm
by owlice
Oh, I like birds in general, actually. Owls are very cool; I've not heard of them being stupid generally (though I've often been a shining example of such, alas!); certainly crows are more clever, though. (Crows are very smart.) Owls are bird brains, but then, so are all birds! :D Owls depend on eyesight and/or hearing (depending on whether they are day or night hunters) and stealth for their hunting; the leading edge of their primary flight feathers are ... hmmm... fringed or serrated, I guess is how I'd put it, which makes their flight soundless. They are very good hunters, much more successful than most (if not all) other raptors.

The owl, a symbol of Athena, was used on possibly the most successful coinage in the history of man, the tetradrachma of Athens, used (going off memory here, so dates are approximate) from about 580 BC to ... 36 BC or thereabouts, IIRC. (Picture here.) Today, the Greek one Euro coin uses the owl almost exactly as it appears there; I think the owl there is very cute! (ETA: Greek Euro coin image)

Maybe that's it... they are just darn cute birds! :D

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 7:18 pm
by Chris Peterson
owlice wrote:My nearest owl (at the moment) is listed as being at the nearest Zoo, and an owl I've never seen (a Burrowing Owl) was listed as the second nearest.
We see owls fairly often, but this one lives near us:

Image

We know it well, because we rescued it from some sort of undetermined injury four years ago, and it's a species that isn't common here.

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 7:20 pm
by Chris Peterson
makc wrote:I think someone said that owls are very stupid birds (as opposed to crows or parrots), why such a sympathy?
All birds are very intelligent- at the higher end of the scale. In intelligence tests, birds fair well against animals like cats and dogs. And amongst the birds, birds of prey tend to be quite intelligent. I don't think it likely that owls are stupid.

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 7:28 pm
by owlice
Oh, Chris, good for you for rescuing him!! (I would NOT want to run into that beak -- yikes!)

I find bird feathers just amazing; look at your owl, for example, at all the fine patterns and subtle shadings on each feather. They are so beautiful, each one a work of art.

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 7:37 pm
by owlice
Chris Peterson wrote: All birds are very intelligent- at the higher end of the scale. In intelligence tests, birds fair well against animals like cats and dogs. And amongst the birds, birds of prey tend to be quite intelligent. I don't think it likely that owls are stupid.

A lot of an owl's brain is taken up with processing visual information; owls are generally not trainable, the way a parrot is, nor clever in solving puzzles, as crows can be. (Crows need a different body, honestly; they are so confined by being birds, I think the smartest of them get frustrated!) So, not the smartest by the way people tend to measure intelligence in birds, but very successful in what they do.

makc, you might want to read "Wesley The Owl: A Remarkable 19 Year Love Story between a Girl And A Barn Owl" or "One Man's Owl" for a close look at life with an owl (if you're interested; if not, ignore!). The first is an easier (less dense) read, the second denser (in writing style), but also very good.

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 10:14 pm
by makc
A bit unrelated, but here it goes:
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
(thank you, internet, for ignoring copyrights)

Re: owlice

Posted: Sat Apr 03, 2010 11:53 pm
by neufer
owlice wrote:The owl, a symbol of Athena, was used on possibly the most successful coinage in the history of man, the tetradrachma of Athens, used (going off memory here, so dates are approximate) from about 580 BC to ... 36 BC or thereabouts, IIRC. (Picture here.) Today, the Greek one Euro coin uses the owl almost exactly as it appears there; I think the owl there is very cute! (ETA: Greek Euro coin image)
http://asterisk.apod.com/vie ... 23&t=16833

Re: owlice

Posted: Sun Apr 04, 2010 1:03 pm
by owlice
makc, very cool parrots! Bet one of those around the house would keep the cats in line! :D

Re: owlice

Posted: Tue Apr 06, 2010 1:35 pm
by geckzilla
Owls are great. But my latest fancy has been frogmouths. I don't know what it is about them but I like looking at them. And when they sleep during the day they pretend they are an appendage of whatever they are attached to. :D

Re: owlice

Posted: Sun Apr 11, 2010 9:04 pm
by Orca
There were Great Horned owls living in the woods behind the house I grew up in. You could hear them hooting back and forth at night. Always very cool to hear!

My dad once told me that he heard a lot of commotion in the back yard one day. He went to investigate; he found a red-tailed hawk fighting with one of the owls. In the end the owl drove the hawk away.

Re: owlice

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:12 am
by owlice
geckzilla, frogmouths are pretty doggone cute!!!

Orca, wow. I wonder why a hawk and owl would duke it out?!

No owls today, but I did see cormorants -- quite a few of them, which is unusual -- on my bike ride today. Also something I couldn't immediately identify, so I need to get out the Sibley to see what it was. Hawk-sized, very cool, and man, was I wishing I had binoculars with me!

Re: owlice

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:26 am
by Orca
owlice wrote: 1. Orca, wow. I wonder why a hawk and owl would duke it out?!

2. Also something I couldn't immediately identify, so I need to get out the Sibley to see what it was. Hawk-sized, very cool, and man, was I wishing I had binoculars with me!
1. Probably over territory, I'd imagine. You see red-tails all over the place around here. Might have been a chance encounter though. Can you imagine - quite a rude awakening for an owl to find a hawk in his face!

2 Osprey? We have a lot of those too, near water sources anyway. The Columbia River and the Coast, not to mention lakes and smaller rivers.

Re: owlice

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 2:17 pm
by RJN

Re: owlice

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:37 pm
by makc

Re: owlice

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 4:17 pm
by owlice
Orca, thanks! Interesting about the owl and hawk. I hope your dad moved your pet mice into the house after that. :D

I don't recall ever seeing osprey in that area before, which may mean exactly nothing, of course! When I first saw it, I thought it was a Black-backed Gull, and once I got off the bike so I could watch him without landing in the river, he of course decided to fly away from rather than toward me. SO annoying, that! I saw another, too, which did come close enough for me to see that he has some sort of face mask (made me think of a Peregrine, though this was bigger than one). Ospreys hover -- I've not seen them do so, but Sibley says they do -- and this did hover, though over land, not water. Hovering was for four to five wingbeats. I've seen falcons hover; that's the only large bird I've seen do it. So maybe an osprey; that could account for the behavior and the facial mask. I'll have to take the little specs with me the next time I ride that trail!
RJN wrote:Eagle's nest live webcam:
http://joshsteinland.com/c_NewBaldEaglesNestCam.php
I may never get another thing done in my entire life...! (Thank you!)

Speaking of Bald Eagles, I see one often when I bike on Hain's Point in DC. There's a particular tree he likes to sit in which gives me a great view of him.

Re: owlice

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:21 pm
by owlice
And speaking of hawks (we were, weren't we? 8-) ), here's a picture of a leucistic Red-tailed Hawk my then-10-year-old took when we were at the Carolina Raptor Center.
leukhawk2.jpeg
leukhawk2.jpeg (83.49 KiB) Viewed 9638 times
This is not an albino; this bird's feathers were normal, and as she lost the ability to produce the melanin necessary for coloration, her normally-colored feathers were gradually replaced with white feathers.

I was at a friend's house for an early dinner and games some weeks ago, and a bird in her yard caught my attention because I'd never seen one like it before. (Well, all the birds caught my attention, but this one *really* caught it!) It acted like a junco, but it certainly didn't look like one! We finally reached consensus in the group that yeah, it really was a junco, but it was pied -- some of its feathers had been replaced with white ones. Eventually, it may end up all white.

Re: owlice

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 12:53 pm
by makc
I have some pictures of birds of prey monks keep in cages that I took when we visited some monastery nearby, but you are not going to like them. They have their wings cut off and don't look too happy.

Re: owlice

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 2:44 pm
by neufer
makc wrote:I have some pictures of birds of prey monks keep in cages that I took when we visited some monastery nearby,
but you are not going to like them. They have their wings cut off and don't look too happy.
Let us prey.

Re: owlice

Posted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 1:47 pm
by owlice
neufer wrote:Let us prey.
Hard to do without wings. :(

More nest cams

Posted: Fri Apr 23, 2010 4:01 pm
by owlice

Re: owlice

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2010 3:31 am
by geckzilla
Saw a leucistic robin on the path in the park the other day and thought of you, owl. 8-)

Re: owlice

Posted: Thu Apr 29, 2010 8:02 am
by owlice
Oh, very cool, geckzilla! I've seen only pics of leucistic robins; have never seen one with mine own eyes. Someday, someday!