WOL

[webofevil]

My colleague psychonomy assures me that barn owls are a liability. “They keep flying into rafters,” he says. “They have perfectly good night vision—they’re just pretty stupid. They seem to think they can fly through solid wood.” This conjures up the possibility that barn owls only got their name because they kept being found unconscious on the floor in barns.


The barn owl's natural enemy
While it’s true that I’m having trouble independently corroborating my colleague’s report (got any links there, psychonomy?), I did happen upon this fact:

Many barn owls die from collisions with cars because they fly low when hunting.

Nature’s own stealth attack aircraft, an acute sensory machine, able to detect from three postcodes away the sound and smell of a mouse thinking of scratching its ear, frequently collides with cars? That’s the kind of design fault that should get a species recalled. Maybe, after all, it’s the corroboration I’ve been looking for. “I’m detecting a rapid shift in low-altitude air pressure... the smell of benzene and other contaminants floods my olfactory receptors... the subtle rustling that pinpointed my prey is now utterly drowned out by a terrible roaring, so close, so close... Oh, right, it’s a Toyota Camry. Piece of piss, I can fly straight through it.”


Oh, for God's sake

Comments

[psychonomy.livejournal.com]

Corroborating links seem practically non-existent (i.e. Googleless), but a couple point to the general idiocy of our avian cousins.

They often fly into utility wires, poles, trees, and buildings and fall to the ground. Between 1978 and 1981, more than 5,000 Newell’s Shearwaters fell on Kaua`i’s highways, athletic fields, and hotel grounds.

One thing missing in this discussion is when the baby bluebirds fledge they tend to leave the box flying in a straight low line and do not have a clue that when they fly into a building that it is going to hurt. Some one posted last year that all four baby bluebirds fledged from his nestbox in a matter of minutes and all four smacked right into the side of his house since he had turned the box to face his living room window and in 25 feet they did not veer away from the siding.

The most telling evidence is the well-documented phenomenon of owls flying into closed windows. They leave their mark: an almost photographic image of a stunned owl in the medium of the fine dust coating their bodies:




The article the image links to is also illustrative on this point. I don't think it's much of a stretch, given the evidence thus far accumulated, to speculate that barn owls might encounter barn rafters at a fairly high velocity on a pretty regular basis.

[tomatorama.livejournal.com]

miss_newham directed me to this post to cheer me up with owls, and the dusty owl print reminds me of something similar that happened at my art college, a pigeon flew into the glass of the tunnel connecting 2 buildings and left a print, and when the glass was replaced a student made some prints with it in the photo lab. Maybe flying into things is why owls have flat faces.

[scattermole.livejournal.com]

That was great, and proof positive that the bat is far superior to the owl, as I'd always suspected.