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For owls that are superb.
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US Wild Animal Rescue Database: Animal Help Now
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If you find an injured owl:
Note your exact location so the owl can be released back where it came from. Contact a licensed wildlife rehabilitation specialist to get correct advice and immediate assistance.
Minimize stress for the owl. If you can catch it, toss a towel or sweater over it and get it in a cardboard box or pet carrier. It should have room to be comfortable but not so much it can panic and injure itself. If you can’t catch it, keep people and animals away until help can come.
Do not give food or water! If you feed them the wrong thing or give them water improperly, you can accidentally kill them. It can also cause problems if they require anesthesia once help arrives, complicating procedures and costing valuable time.
If it is a baby owl, and it looks safe and uninjured, leave it be. Time on the ground is part of their growing up. They can fly to some extent and climb trees. If animals or people are nearby, put it up on a branch so it’s safe. If it’s injured, follow the above advice.
For more detailed help, see the OwlPages Rescue page.
Community Rules:
Posts must be about owls. Especially appreciated are photographs (not AI) and scientific content, but artwork, articles, news stories, personal experiences and more are welcome too.
Be kind. If a post or comment bothers you, or strikes you as offensive in any way, please report it and moderators will take appropriate action.
AI is discouraged. If you feel strongly that the community would benefit from a post that involves AI you may submit it, but it might be removed if the moderators feel that it is low-effort or irrelevant.
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Let's fucking Go Ruru!
Morepork for those outside NZ. I was surprised to see it on the list tbh
Ruru actually finished 5th overall last year and I'm pretty sure did ok in 2023 as well. It's an adorable little owl with a fun name and has a built in international fan base thanks to the Discworld series of novels.
I try to make sure to cover the world of owls as evenly as possible, so there's no forgetting NZs unique (but no longer only) owl.
Oh that's cool. I'm glad to see the Ruru getting some love.
I haven't read Discworld, but I know a few people that have that enjoyed it, so maybe I should get around to it some time. There's just so many its a bit intimidating!
I think there are 42 books, so it is a lot. I put it off forever, but started this year with Guards, Guards (#8) and loved that, then did Mort (#4), Equal Rites (#3), and then figured I better start at the beginning since I seemed to be invested.
Someone had told me The Hogfather live action movie was on YouTube, and I watched that last year before reading the books, and was a bit lost on what was going on, but still enjoyed it.
I'm on Pyramids (#7) now, and while they all seem rather self contained at this point where you could start anywhere, Guards, Guards is a good place to start if you prefer a crime story centered around dragons, or Mort to get a solid into to Death, who generally at least has a few pop-ins in each story.
Lore feels well established, but not deep, so it's not intimidating to learn how this universe works, and if something seems unusual like an orangutan librarian, don't expect much deeper of an intro than that, he's cool with it, so people just leave him to his books, so why should the reader question it deeper than that? It's just fun to read for the sarcasm, wit, and funny events, nothing to be taken seriously.
Yea, I've heard it's quirky like that. And I know there are a lot of good quotes that have emerged from it. Maybe that will be my new years resolution. Read one book and see how I get on.
They make great audiobooks, since they're pretty light reading. I switched from my normal doom and gloom news podcasts to Discworld on my commute and can knock them out fairly quickly as they're in the 8-9 hour range. So far, they've all been on YouTube, though one got pulled part way through and I needed to find my place again.
Oh, on YouTube. Are they not copyright anymore?
I've been listening to audiobooks lately, so I might have a look on YouTube!
They don't look to be officially sanctioned, but they don't seem to be too aggressively monitored either. I watched the animated movie for The Wyrd Sisters the other week after finishing that, and that video says it's been up for 12 years. If you're just looking to see if you like the humor, it's a quick way anyone can access.
As a side note, I was randomly scrolling All when I came across this post.
I was slightly confused to see an owl match up in a super bowl community, but thought that's cool though.
Having actually scrolled through some more posts, all about owls, I realised that the community is instead superb owls >. < feeling a little silly, but I subscribed hoping to see more owls <3
It is a carryover joke/pun/wordplay from Reddit. I wasn't totally thrilled it carried over since non-sports people and those who aren't Americans often don't get it and skip/block us, confusing it with American football.
As you've seen, we're all about owls here! A lot of it comes from me, mainly just because I think they're neat, but after doing so many posts on them here, I started working at a wild animal rescue once a week, where I'm sometimes lucky enough to get to work with them in person. So I'm not expert, but I do spend a bit of time learning about them and have some hands on time with them.
I will make sure you see tons of great owls from around the globe, learn all the things that make them special, their unique anatomy, and the latest and greatest in owl news and research. Once a year, we also hold Owl of the Year, basically just for fun and to freshen up the community banner and icon, but it also lets me know what you all are into or not into.
If you ever have questions, just ask! I love replying to everyone and will teach you all you want to know about these great animals.
That's cool, awesome you can give something back to what you love.
Owls are definitely pretty cool animals, I'll look forward to seeing further posts!
It is more fun than I could have imagined!
And while I have not yet met a Ruru in person yet, I did happen to run into an Australian Boobook near me, and got the opportunity to hold it for a bit.
I thought my mind was playing tricks on me when I saw it. I am roughly between New York City and Washington DC in the US, so an Australian owl was not something I ever expected to see here, let alone interact with. I did think it was Ruru at first, but there are a lot of types of Boobook owls, and I did not expect to see any of them here, but it was one of the huge highlights of this year for me.
A quick wiki tells me that they were considered the same species until recently. It does look remarkably similar.
I don't imagine that it would be there naturally (although I'm very unfamiliar with import of animals into the states nor migration patterns of owls if they have them. Although I do know barn owls made it to NZ from Oz so maybe I'm just blissfully unaware) so I imagine it was introduced at some point?
Its actually bigger than I thought.
Where I live, it's quite common to hear Rurus calling not long after dark. Some of the screeches they make are not at all like their name
Affordable genetic testing is really opening up a lot of new info about owls, so even though we've been fascinated with them since our earliest days, we are still currently learning so many new things about them thanks to modern tech that makes studying them so much easier. Owl classifications can get messy, but it's proof we're still learning so much!
It was a little larger than I had expected as well, but it was still almost weightless. Owls are 40-60 percent feathers by volume, and even the part that is bird is as hollow as possible.
I don't know exactly how it got where I was. It was an event for an animal rescue group, and I went to see their new Snowy Owl, but a lot of the birds there were actually bred in captivity to serve as educational animals, and this is likely one of those, otherwise I likely wouldn't have been able to handle it, as if it were a rescue, we generally try to give them the last amount of time around humans as possible so they don't start to get tamed.
Owls can have pretty large vocabularies! Some studies show they can have up to 2 or 3 dozen unique vocalizations and that they can determine the "voices" of different owls, at least to the point they can tell if it is an acquaintance or a stranger they should investigate.
Our resident Great Horned Owl at the clinic is very grumpy and he makes all kinds of noises to show his dissatisfaction well beyond his trademark hoot. 😄
Seeing the skeleton of an owl is a game-changer for realising how much of them is floof!
That's pretty cool that they are able to recognise others owls based on their calls. I guess they're not called wise for nothing.
Do you know how their intelligence compares to corvids or parrots?
Apparently NZ has 3 species of owls. I wasn't aware we had a small population of Small (Athena) owls in the south island.
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.
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.
I found this little post that discusses this in a far fewer words than I could! 😅
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
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.
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
Awesome, thanks, I'll check it out