91 Fun Facts About Owls

What is unusual about how an owl's eyes sit in its skull?

They cannot move at all: bony sclerotic rings hold each eye rigid in the skull, so an owl has to swing its whole head just to glance sideways.

Which large tufted owl with orange eyes has a wingspan that can reach about 1.8 metres?

The Eurasian Eagle-Owl is strong enough to kill foxes and deer fawns, though voles, rats and other small mammals make up most of what it eats.

What are the compact masses of indigestible prey remains that owls expel called?

Because owls swallow prey whole when they can, the bones, fur and scales come back up compacted, which is why researchers pick pellets apart to study owl diets.

What collective noun is commonly used to refer to a group of owls?

A parliament is the collective noun, though you would struggle to convene one: most owls are solitary birds that roost and hunt alone.

Roughly how far can an owl swivel its head in either direction?

270° is the limit, not the full circle of popular belief, but it lets a perched owl look behind itself without shifting its body, so it stays still and quiet while it scans for prey.

Which feather feature helps most owls fly almost silently?

Serrated edges on leading flight feathers work like a comb, breaking the rushing air into tiny eddies and muffling each wingbeat, so prey rarely hears the owl coming.

What lets many owls pinpoint prey by sound alone?

Many owls have asymmetrically placed ear openings, one higher than the other, so sound reaches each ear at slightly different times and volumes and the brain pinpoints prey in both planes.

What do most owls mainly eat?

Small mammals and insects top the menu, rodents above all, which is why farmers put up nest boxes to recruit barn owls as pest control.

In Greek mythology, which goddess had the owl as her sacred animal?

Athena, goddess of wisdom, was pictured with a little owl at her side, and the bird still carries her name in science: Athene noctua.

What term describes female owls being larger than males in many species?

Reverse sexual dimorphism shapes owl family life: the smaller male does most of the hunting while the larger female stays on the nest with the eggs and chicks.

Which owl has the largest facial disc of any bird of prey?

The Great Gray Owl has the largest facial disc of any raptor, but its bulk is deceptive: thick, fluffy plumage makes the bird look far heavier than it really is.

What is the primary function of an owl's facial disc?

To direct sound waves to their ears: the disc works like a radar dish, and an owl can reshape it at will with its facial muscles to home in on a faint rustle.

In Edward Lear's nonsense poem, what do the Owl and the Pussy-Cat go to sea in?

A pea-green boat carries the pair for a year and a day to the land where the Bong-tree grows, where a pig sells them the ring from its nose and a turkey marries them.

Owls form two families: the 'true owls' and which other, home to the barn owls?

Tytonidae is by far the smaller of the two families, yet its barn owls have spread further than any other owl and rank among the most widely distributed land birds on Earth.

In A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh, how does the wise Owl spell his own name?

WOL is how Owl spells it; Milne adds that, wise as he is, he goes all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.

What is the primary purpose of an owl's hoot?

Owls hoot to attract mates and defend territory. Each species has its own calls, which also help ornithologists and birders tell them apart.

What keeps blood flowing to an owl's brain during an extreme head turn?

Wide vertebral canals and joined arteries do it: the bony holes are about ten times the vertebral artery's diameter, giving slack, and connecting vessels link the carotid and vertebral arteries so flow continues during a twist.

When do most owls begin incubating their eggs?

Most owls begin incubating after the first egg is laid, so eggs hatch in sequence and nestlings differ in age and size; in lean years the youngest chicks often starve.

What colour are a barn owl's eyes?

Black eyes mark the barn owl, and at night it barely needs them: experiments show it can catch a mouse in total darkness by hearing alone.

The speckled brown plumage of the tawny owl lets it lie in wait unseen in which habitat?

The tawny owl is a bird of deciduous woodland; its speckled brown plumage matches bark and leaf litter, so a roosting bird often gives itself away only by its calls or by mobbing songbirds.

Which deep-hooting species is the most widely distributed true owl in the Americas?

The Great Horned Owl ranges from the subarctic to South America and is one of the few predators that make a regular meal of skunks.

Most owls hunt at night, but some are busiest in the twilight of dawn and dusk; which term describes them?

Crepuscular means active at twilight: pygmy owls hunt then, and even the barn owl, a byword for night, is most often seen quartering fields at dawn or dusk.

What is the translucent 'third eyelid' that sweeps across an owl's eye called?

The nictitating membrane wipes and shields the eye. Owls also sleep the opposite way to us: the upper lid does the blinking, but the lower lid rises to close the eye for sleep.

The barn owl is told apart from other owls by a pale face of which shape?

Heart-shaped and ghostly white: glimpsed gliding silently past a churchyard at dusk, that face earned the barn owl folk names such as ghost owl.

Owl chicks that leave the nest before they can fly, clambering about the tree, are known as what?

Branchers leave home early: long-eared owl chicks quit the nest at about three weeks old, a fortnight before they can fly, and wait on nearby limbs to be fed.

What are the 'ear tufts' on large owls thought to be for?

Visual signals in social displays is one idea, camouflage another; the tufts play no part in hearing, and the real ears sit hidden at the sides of the head.

Which Disney film features a grumpy, highly educated talking owl named Archimedes?

The Sword in the Stone: Archimedes is the wizard Merlin's owl, and when Merlin turns young Arthur into a sparrow it is Archimedes who teaches him to fly.

What is the scientific order to which all owl species belong?

Strigiformes is the owls' own order, but it was a late split: Linnaeus lumped owls with hawks, eagles and falcons in a single order of birds of prey.

What is the typical shape of owl eggs?

Owl eggs are almost round and plain white: laid mostly out of sight, they have little need of the camouflage markings other birds' eggs carry.

Which long-legged owl sprints across the ground after its prey?

The Burrowing Owl, a bird of open grassland and prairie rather than forest, evolved longer legs than other owls and will chase insects and small prey on foot.

What is the term for an owl grooming its feathers with beak and talons?

Preening is the grooming every bird does with its beak, repositioning feathers, re-zipping separated barbules and removing parasites; owls also scratch their facial discs with a talon.

How well do owls see at very close range?

Owls are farsighted, so anything a few centimeters away is a blur; their eyes are built to spot movement at distance, and at close range the owl relies on touch instead.

Which owl's call is written as 'Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all'?

The Barred Owl's 'Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?' is not only a night sound: this vocal owl also calls, and even hunts, in broad daylight.

A 'night owl' stays up late; which bird gives its name to the opposite, an early riser?

Lark is the label sleep researchers use too: whether you are a morning lark or a night owl is your chronotype, and it is shaped partly by your genes.

What is the primary role of an owl's powerful talons?

Catching and killing prey is the talons' job: an owl strikes feet-first with its claws spread wide, and a big owl's grip is strong enough to crush a skull.

Which rare owl of Japan, China and the Russian Far East is often ranked as the world's largest?

Blakiston's Fish Owl is rare as well as huge: it hunts salmon and trout in cold rivers and nests only in cavernous old-growth trees, so logging leaves it nowhere to breed.

Owls grip with two toes pointing forward and two back, a layout they share with which other birds?

Parrots share the layout, called zygodactyl, as do woodpeckers; owls go one better and can swing a back toe round to the front when they perch or walk.

How do most owls come by a nest?

They take over abandoned nests or tree cavities: most owls never build at all, moving into an old hawk nest, a woodpecker hole or a squirrel's drey instead.

An owl squeezes huge eyes into a small skull, so what shape have they evolved into?

Tubular: an owl has no eyeballs in the strict sense, only long tubes that work like a pair of built-in telephoto lenses.

Which part of an owl's spine has 14 vertebrae, twice as many as a human's?

The neck: 14 vertebrae against our seven give an owl the extra joints it needs to swing its head round and look straight behind itself.

In modern Japan, owls are generally regarded as what?

In modern Japan owls are lucky: the name fukurō can be written to read 'no hardship', and owl charms are sold for good fortune, a reversal of the bird's grim reputation in older Japanese folklore.

Which owls have lost the silent flight of their relatives because their prey cannot hear them coming?

Fishing owls hunt prey that is under water and deaf to wingbeats, so silence brought them no advantage and their wings are as noisy as any other bird's.

What are the light-sensitive retinal cells responsible for an owl's low-light vision called?

Rods pack an owl's retina and pick up the faintest light and movement, but they barely register colour, so an owl's night world is short on it.

What are the filoplumes an owl uses to feel prey in its grasp?

Filoplumes are hairlike feathers on the beak and feet that serve an owl as feelers; on most birds they lie hidden beneath the other feathers.

Which birds will gather from considerable distances to mob a roosting owl for hours?

Crows have good reason for the racket: after dark the tables turn, and large owls are among the main predators of crows and their young.

How does a roosting owl improve its camouflage when something alarms it?

Stretches tall and thin: with its feathers pulled in tight, its eyes narrowed to slits and any ear tufts raised, the owl passes for a broken branch.

Owls' forward-facing eyes give them which kind of sight, allowing them to judge depth much as humans do?

Binocular vision gives an owl the depth perception to strike accurately, but the price is a narrow field of view, one reason it turns its head so much.

Which Canadian province, the largest by area, has the snowy owl as its emblem?

Quebec made the snowy owl, harfang des neiges in French, its avian emblem because the bird stands for the whiteness of the province's winters and its northern climate.

Which man-made habitat is among the most attractive to wintering snowy owls in North America?

Airports suit them because the flat, treeless grass looks and hunts like the Arctic tundra they left behind, and the verges are full of rodents.

The snowy owl's breeding success is tied to the population cycles of which prey?

Lemmings set the pace: in boom years a pair may lay up to 11 eggs, while in bust years many snowy owls skip breeding entirely.

Which Philadelphia university's sports teams are known as the Owls?

Temple grew out of night classes for working people in the 1880s, so its students were night owls from the start, and the bird has been its symbol ever since.

What is the name of Harry Potter's pet snowy owl?

Hedwig, Harry Potter's snowy owl, was a birthday gift from Hagrid in the first book; Errol and Pigwidgeon are the Weasleys' owls and Fawkes is Dumbledore's phoenix.

Early naturalists nicknamed the great horned owl after which big cat?

Tiger was the tribute: 'winged tiger' and 'tiger of the air' honoured a hunter that takes prey heavier than itself, full-grown skunks and even porcupines included.

Which TV mystery series gave the world the cryptic warning 'The owls are not what they seem'?

Twin Peaks: a giant appears to FBI agent Dale Cooper in a vision and gives him the line as one of three clues in the hunt for Laura Palmer's killer.

In the Harry Potter stories, what everyday job do owls do for witches and wizards?

Delivering the post: the wizarding world has no phones or email, so letters and parcels travel by owl, and a wizard's own bird doubles as a letter carrier.

How does a great grey owl catch voles hidden beneath deep snow?

It plunges in after hearing them: the owl pinpoints a vole by ear alone, then crashes feet-first through a foot or more of snow to grab it.

What material do burrowing owls most often use to line their nests?

Cattle dung is the usual choice. It was once thought to mask the chicks' scent; researchers now think it steadies the burrow's climate and lures the insects the owls eat.

When threatened in the nest, burrowing owl chicks imitate the sound of which animal?

A rattlesnake: the chicks' buzzing hiss copies the warning of a snake that really does shelter in rodent burrows, so a predator at the entrance thinks twice.

What do elf owls do when they are handled by a predator?

Elf owls play dead when caught: a limp owl encourages the predator to relax its grip, buying the sparrow-sized bird a chance to escape.

Elf owls often nest in abandoned woodpecker holes in which plant?

Saguaro cactus trunks are riddled with old woodpecker holes, and a male elf owl sings from inside a likely one to coax a female into accepting it.

What is the term for an owl hiding surplus prey to eat later?

Caching pays off in the north: a large owl may let a spare carcass freeze solid in the fork of a tree, then sit on it later to thaw it with its own body heat.

Which owl found in Britain today was introduced there in the late 19th century?

The little owl is no native: brought over from mainland Europe, it took so well that it spread across much of England and into parts of Wales.

What nickname, their word for a little owl, did ancient Greeks give the owl-stamped silver tetradrachm?

Glaux, or glaukes in the plural, came from the bird on the coin's reverse, and collectors writing in English still call these tetradrachms simply 'owls'.

Which philosopher wrote that the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk?

G. W. F. Hegel wrote in the preface to his Philosophy of Right (1820) that 'the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk': philosophy understands an era only as it ends.

In 2007 an eagle-owl landed on the pitch and stopped an international football match for six minutes in which city?

Helsinki: the owl settled on a goalpost at the Olympic Stadium during a Finland–Belgium qualifier, and the Finnish team took the nickname Huuhkajat, 'the eagle-owls'.

Like the gorilla, the Eurasian eagle-owl has a scientific name that repeats one word; what is it?

Bubo bubo is a tautonym, like Pica pica the magpie and Vulpes vulpes the red fox; zoologists allow such doubled names, but the rules of botany forbid them for plants.

The short-eared owl occurs on every continent except Antarctica and which other?

Australia misses out even though the short-eared owl breeds from Europe and the Americas to Hawaii and the Galápagos, one of the widest ranges of any bird.

What is the Hawaiian name for the islands' native short-eared owl?

Pueo break the owl rule of working nights: Hawaii's short-eared owls hunt by day, and are most often seen hovering or soaring over open country.

The extinct laughing owl, last recorded dead in 1914, was native to which country?

The laughing owl, or whēkau, was endemic to New Zealand; the last specimen was found dead at Bluecliffs Station, Canterbury, in July 1914, after stoats introduced to control rabbits overwhelmed it.

Ornimegalonyx, a 1.1 m tall giant owl thought to be the largest ever, lived on which island?

Ornimegalonyx lived on Cuba, where it was flightless or nearly so and preyed on giant rodents and ground sloths; its first bones were so big they were taken for a terror bird's.

In some winters snowy owls pour south far beyond their normal range; what is such a mass movement called?

An irruption can follow a good breeding year as well as a hungry one: a bumper crop of chicks leaves too many young owls for the Arctic to feed, so they scatter south.

Barred owls spreading west since the 1960s have become a major threat to which native owl?

The northern spotted owl, already squeezed by old-growth logging, is outcompeted by the bigger, more aggressive barred owl, which crossed the continent helped by fire suppression, tree planting and a warming climate.

In 2020 a tiny saw-whet owl was found inside which landmark's Christmas tree as it was being put up?

Nicknamed Rocky after Rockefeller Center, she had ridden 170 miles from Oneonta, New York, inside the wrapped spruce and was released upstate after a check-up.

North America's boreal owl is known in Europe and Asia by what name?

Tengmalm's owl, named for a Swedish naturalist, is normally monogamous, but in years when prey is plentiful both males and females have been caught raising broods with extra mates.

Which owl of the northern forests hunts by day and flies like the bird of prey in its name?

The northern hawk-owl hunts mainly by sight in daylight and is often taken for a Cooper's hawk in flight; it may fill the niche that day-hunting hawks hold elsewhere.

The Ainu of which Japanese island revere an owl as Kotan koru Kamuy, 'god that protects the village'?

Hokkaido's Ainu also knew the owl god as a bringer of wealth: in one sacred song he pities a poor household and fills its hut with treasure overnight.

The famous 'tu-whit, tu-whoo' owl call from Shakespeare is actually what?

A female-male duet: she calls a sharp 'kew-wick' and he answers with the wavering hoot, two birds that the song in Love's Labour's Lost rolled into one.

Bird photographer Eric Hosking lost an eye in 1937 to an attack by which owl?

A tawny owl struck Hosking in the face at its nest in 1937, costing him an eye; he took it in stride, titling his 1970 autobiography An Eye for a Bird.

With no tawny owls present, which species has become Ireland's dominant owl?

Elsewhere tawny owls eat or evict the weaker long-eared owl; in Ireland it has the woods to itself.

Which possum-hunting Ninox species is the largest owl on its home continent?

The powerful owl is Australia's largest owl and lives mainly on tree-dwelling marsupials, above all ringtail possums and gliders, which it snatches from the branches with its feet.

Pel's fishing owl honours a governor of the Dutch Gold Coast, a colony in which modern country?

Ghana: Hendrik Pel went out to the Dutch Gold Coast as a specimen collector for the Leiden museum, rose to govern it in the 1840s, and had this fish-snatching owl named after him.

What unusual colour are the eyelids of Verreaux's eagle-owl, Africa's largest owl?

Pink eyelids are found on no other owl and show within a week of hatching; one idea is that this dark-eyed bird flashes them in courtship and territorial displays.

Northern pygmy-owls carry a pair of false 'eyespots' on which part of the body?

Two black, white-edged patches on the back of the head mimic eyes; the false eyespots may deter predators and mobbing songbirds from attacking from behind.

What is the Māori name for the morepork owl?

Ruru is the Māori name for the morepork, New Zealand's native boobook; morepork, boobook and mopoke are all onomatopoeic renderings of its two-note call.

Which mythological river lends its name to a dark-plumaged owl of Latin America?

The Stygian owl is named for the Styx, the river of the underworld, on account of its very dark plumage; fittingly, it hunts bats far more often than other owls do.

Instead of hooting, what sound does the barn owl make?

A drawn-out screech is the barn owl's signature call; cornered birds, young and old alike, switch to a hiss to scare the intruder away.

Farmers in Israel and which neighbour swapped rodent pesticides for barn owls?

Jordan joined Israel's barn-owl project, led by Tel Aviv University's Yossi Leshem, in which nest boxes in farmland replaced rodent poisons; a barn owl family can take thousands of rodents a year.

In Hinduism, the owl is the vahana (mount) of which goddess?

Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, is shown with an owl, above all in eastern India; said to be blinded by daylight, the bird is read as a warning not to be blinded by riches.

Which Aztec god, lord of the dead, was often depicted with owls?

Mictlantecuhtli wore owl feathers in his headdress, and the link outlived the Aztecs: a Mexican saying still runs, 'When the owl sings, the Indian dies.'

Pliny recorded that Rome was ritually purified after an owl strayed into which building?

The Capitol: Pliny says the owl got into its very sanctuary and Rome was purified that March, because the bird was a dire omen whenever it was seen in a city or by day.

In the Maya Popol Vuh, owls serve as messengers of which underworld?

Xibalba, roughly 'place of fright', was ruled by the Maya death gods; in the Popol Vuh their owl messengers carry the fatal invitation to come down and play ball.