I love that owls are associated with wisdom when they’re actually not particularly intelligent. They’re fantastic hunters and highly adapted to their environment but they get disoriented fairly easily and don’t have the memory and problem solving skills of highly intelligent birds like corvids and parrots. They’re not utilized for falconry as often as other birds of prey because they’re difficult to train and not very social and again, not terribly bright. They’re always at wildlife rescues for the most ridiculous reasons, getting stuck somewhere or hopelessly tangled in something or flying directly into a car. I love owls but they’re very silly and when they’re not in their element, every day is like their first day on earth. They evolved to be the perfect nocturnal/crepuscular predators with extremely sharp senses and swift movements but everything else confuses them.
Pigeons are far more intelligent than owls and they’re mocked for their perceived stupidity simply because they’re domesticated animals that humanity abandoned. Owls evolved to not be able to find their way out of a wet cardboard box.
At one of my gazillion stupid jobs, we have in our care a Great Horned Owl. She is a massive bird with all the classic features: intricate feathers, piercing yellow eyes, talons almost the size of a human hand. It’s like looking at a dragon. Loads of people expect owls to sleep during the day, but they usually do more of a doze. Our owl spends a lot of time peering out at the world with her piercing yellow eyes, tracking movement and holding staring contests with visitors and staff.
It’s this strong visual tracking and alertness that makes her the first thing most visitors clock when they enter the site, and honestly, it tends to freak them out a bit. Your hair stands up and you’re instantly aware you’re being studied by a predator. People stop in their tracks to stare back.
But stare or no stare, Great Horned Owls are still nocturnal and so our esteemed colleague stays put chilling. The guests all go wowwww I wonder what she must be thinking? And she stands mysteriously still.
This is why it came as a big shock when one day, during a normal pathway sweeping, she decided to launch full kill mode on the maintenance guy.
This bird has an injury that prevents release, but she’s flighted with a 5-odd foot wingspan. Long term state of the art vet care has made her pretty much the maximum hugeness and buffness her species can attain. So it was the wee hours of the morning, Maintenance Guy sweeping between the aviaries by headlamp light, when the full mass of this aerial hunting machine crashed claws-first into the glass of her enclosure, inches from his head. She knows there’s glass there, by the way. She can avoid it. At that moment she just didn’t care.
So Maintenance Guy yelps and staggers back. Owl has managed to reorient on a branch and is now staring at him, pupils constricted, fully fluffed up and hooting a contralto territorial threat call. Maintenance Guy has been working here, trusted by the critters, for like 8 years. But now he can barely get a whoa hey whoa in before she swoops the glass again, collides, scratches her way down, and winds up on the ground flared up and locked in like the hounds of hell are at her door. Of course we don’t want her attacking the wall, she’ll hurt herself. Thus Maintenance Guy, now apparently first on his old friend’s shit list for no reason, has to scamper back inside and call off cleaning for the morning.
He reports it to the vet staff and they go to check on her. They approach one at a time with great caution, only to find the Great Horned Owl once again situated back up on her branch, big chilling. One at a time, with great caution, they enter the enclosure and look around for weird changes and uhhh digestive signs of illness. But nothing looks off, and the owl continues big chilling.
Everyone’s scratching their heads. The rest of the day goes by smoothly, even when Maintenance Guy walks past on rounds. No trace of threat or stress behavior at all. It seems the shit list is cancelled. Now it’s our turn to stare deep into her piercing yellow eyes, her ever-watchful gaze, and wonder - what must she be thinking?
It took 3 more incidents like this for us to figure out that she’d started a territorial rivalry with the mop.
Owls, everyone.
hahahahaaaa
in other news humans are adorable
“we consider ourselves super smart (because we wrote our own definition of smart so of course we’re the experts on it) and because we’re so smart we also think that animals which look like us (round heads with lots of fluff to make head look big, also flat face and big forward facing eyes) are also smart and full of knowledge. (Though the only other thing they have in common with us is their call sounds like one of our words) (specifically one of the words we say when we don’t know stuff)”