Owls don't weigh 16 pounds (except for fat owls). 300 kilowatts is a rate of energy, not a total quantity of energy. 300 kilowatt hours (which is possibly what they meant?) Is only around 260,000 kilocalories (which is called "calories" on food labels because units of measure were made up by humans). According to an extremely naive google search, that would only take an owl 5 years to consume, rather than 10. If the original number were correct, that would mean this owl eats 8,000 calories per day. Which is not typical.

Onto the broader point, the efficiency of birds in flight is not as simple as this image suggests. There is no (useful) formula that takes the weight of a bird and the distance it will fly and tells you how many calories that takes. Birds can fly at different elevations, at different speeds. They can fly with or against the wind. They can change many things about how they fly to be more efficient or less efficient.

If you really want to know how many calories it takes for an owl to cross the ocean, first get the owl to the point of starvation, then bring it on a boat to the middle of the ocean. Feed it a fixed number of Tootsie pops, then sink the boat. With nowhere else to land, the owl will be forced to fly to shore. Based on how far the owl makes it, you can determine how far each tootsie pop allowed it to fly, and derive calories per mile from that.

An owl emitting 300 kilowatts of power would explode in a ball of flame that would light up the neighbourhood. I've never seen this happen, so I do have doubts about the numbers given here.

Power is not a measure of work.

Prager u science books for the Shitler youth be like…

nO, NO, I remember this from physics. Energy is only used to move things up and down. Side to side doesn't count. So as long as the owl stays at the same height on the tree it launched from, it can go as far as it needs to.

Biggest owl weighs up to 10 lbs. (Blakiston’s Fish Owl)

300kW has dimension J/s and calorie has dimension J. It's like saying that you would walk 5km/h equivalent of over 200m.

I will not entertain the notion that they were sloppy with what units they used.

But they recharge on power lines, that's just science.

Why is the owl flying across the Atlantic?

Why would the owls be migrating East/ West? So e they just go north/ south?

I'll take a stab at it.

There are no known owl species that naturally grow up to 16 pounds. The rest of the numbers are just as meaningless.

If you wanted to check what it would take for a random owl species to migrate across the ocean from europe to north america, that's something we can kind of check.

After a bit of lookup, it seems that the burrowing owl needs about 50-75 calories a day at rest to live, flight multiplies those calories by a factor of roughly 9.2 times. (I'mma round up to 10 because fuck it.) So 500-750 a day of pure flight at a speed of somewhere between 2 and 33 mph. I'm going to settle at 20 because I like easy numbers and I feel like it's not too crazy fast. So 20 miles per hour across 24 hours gets us a distance of 480 miles. Iceland and Scotland are 500 miles away. Assuming any of these assumptions are at all fair, it seems like an owl hellbent on crossing the ocean could manage to do it with laser guidance in less than two days without access to ground based food.

And it’s not even carrying a coconut

All these people in the comments be acting like owls are real when you can easily see how fake the are when you buy them in Home Depot’s gardening department.

Now imagine that owl is carrying a coconut.

Owls expel pellets. E = mc^2. By expelling pellets made of matter, owls gain energy that they then use in migratory flight.

You can’t fact check something that doesn’t provide any of its work. Where did they get those numbers from? What equations did they use, and do they actually apply to this situation? Is the owl flying through a vacuum, through air, through honey? In reality, it would be flying through air, but we have no idea what the equation says it’s flying through, or even if it is flying. Maybe the equation is for cars traveling on a road.

Since it’s non-falsifiable, you can just disregard it. Claims require evidence, not assertions.

Most of them are stealthy enough to stowl away on a boat though.

The barn owl (the most common owl on the planet) weighs max 700g (listed on Table 1 here https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/brnowl/cur/appearance#meas but you need a subscription). So like 1.5 lbs.

Birds don’t really migrate east/west, and owls hardly migrate at all, and only a few species, not really barn owls. I’m not sure if there is an owl that migrates like that but even if it was true, tiny ruby throated hummingbirds migrate nonstop across the gulf. Weight doesn’t really matter.

Kilowatt is a rate of energy, not an amount. So let’s calculate that. And energy use in owls is documented on birds of the world as well. Flight speed is 80 km/h https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/brnowl/cur/behavior#locom

Energy use is 360.4 kJ/d, let’s triple that for continual flight across the ocean (idk I’m just making that up since this is all fake anyway), so 1081.2, we’ll round up to 1100.

Estimates of daily food consumption rates are limited. One captive female consumed a mean of 60.5 g/d over one year, amounting to 10.1% of her mass daily; consumption varied from 46.4 g/d in the warmest periods to 74.0 g/d in the coldest times (147). Two American Barn Owl consumed a mean of 74.1 g/d over a 10 d trial in August; it was estimated that energy use was 360.4 kJ/d (148). Other measures of daily food intake for wild American Barn Owl estimated from pellet contents range from 110 g/d in summer in Colorado (113) to a mean of 150 g/d over 1 yr in California (149). The mean gross energy intake for 4 (1 female, 3 males) sedentary American Barn Owl was 68.9 kcal/d; mean existence energy was 54.6 kcal/d, resulting in 79.3% efficiency in food utilization (150).

I just measured across from Massachusetts to Portugal, around 3000 mi or 4800 km. About 60 hours, so 1100 kJ/24h / 24/h x 60 h = 2750kJ = 657265.774 Calorie.

So yeah, very fake.

What's that in horsepower?

What if it takes a boat?