4 August: International Owl Awareness Day

Today is International Owl Awareness Day. Here are 10 facts about owls:

1. There are over 200 species of owl. The order they belong to is called Strigiformes. The smallest owl in the world is the elf owl, which lives in the southwestern United States and Mexico. It is 5 – 6 inches tall and weighs about 1½ ounces. The largest is the Great Gray Owl, which is up to 32 inches tall.
2. It’s said an owl can rotate its head a full 360 degrees. It can’t; that’s a myth. That said the owl does have a pretty impressive range of neck movement. It can turn its neck 135 degrees in each direction and so has 270 degrees of movement in total. Most animals can’t do that because turning the neck so far would cut off the Blood supply to the Brain. Owls have a specially adapted blood-pooling system to supply their eyes and brains with blood when they turn their heads.
3. An owl has excellent vision at a distance – it can detect prey by sight as far as half a mile away. This is because its eyes are tubular rather than spherical. They can‘t move their eyes, which is why they’ve evolved to turn their heads so far. Their close vision isn’t so good, though. It’s so bad they can barely see what they’re eating once they’ve caught it, and have to depend on small feathers on their feet and beaks to feel their meals.
4. The colour of an owl’s eyes is an indicator of when they hunt. Owls which always hunt at night have dark Brown or Black eyes; owls which hunt by day have Yellow eyes and those which hunt at dusk have Orange or Red eyes.
5. Their hearing is excellent, too. Owls are capable of hearing prey under leaves, plants, dirt, and Snow. The tufts on top of their heads, which look like ears, are actually just feathers. Owls ears are on the sides of their heads, often at different heights to help them locate the direction of sound. Some species’ ears are different sizes, as well.
6. Owls swallow their prey whole and then puke up the bits they can’t digest, like bones and fur. This is what owl pellets are.
7. Owls make perfect natural pest control. A single barn owl family will eat 3,000 rodents in a four-month breeding cycle, for example. Hence farmers often encourage owls to nest on their land, building nest boxes for them.
8. Owls have long been associated with wisdom. This may be because in the Little Owl was the companion of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The collective noun for owls is a parliament, which originates from the Narnia stories by CS Lewis, in which a group of wise old owls hold a meeting. (Though at time and place of writing, “wisdom” and “Parliament” are not words I would ever put together unless I was being sarcastic!)
9. Many cultures also associate owls with death. The Aztec god of death, Mictlantecuhtli, was often pictured with owls as companions. In Kenya, people believed that seeing or hearing an owl meant someone was about to die. An owl’s hoot is a common sound heard in spooky films and they’re often associated with witches. And Harry Potter. Only in the Harry Potter stories, they bring the mail rather than death or bad luck!
10. It’s illegal to keep an owl as a pet in the USA. If you want to hang out with owls, the place to go is Japan. In Japan, owls are seen as lucky and there are owl cafés, where people can have tea and hang out with the local owl population.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

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