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US Wild Animal Rescue Database: Animal Help Now
International Wildlife Rescues: RescueShelter.com
Australia Rescue Help: WIRES
Germany-Austria-Switzerland-Italy Wild Bird Rescue: wildvogelhilfe.org
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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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