raptor_rehab_of_kentucky
Peek A Hoo!
Nest boxes, in our mews and flights, offer places to hide and rest for the Eastern Screech Owls in our care.
Source: instagram.com
Whoooooooo are you?
The flight of an owl has long been touted for its silent strength. Owls’ acute hearing, wide-range of vision, large wing-span, and ability to glide aids them in their hunt. However, the anatomy of owls’ feathers deserves the most credit for quieting their flights.
Contour feathers on the front of an owl’s wings have serrated edges, which break up the air-turbulence rushing over them. Instead of one large gush of air, the varied length and stiffness of the feathers disperses the air into micro-turbulences. Essentially one big sound disintegrates into many little ones. The sound waves from the micro-turbulences oscillate at much higher frequencies, inaudible to humans and most of an owl’s prey.
Curious to see this in action? Watch this clip released from the BBC Two’s new special on owls. The clip features a pigeon, falcon, and owl flying over super-sensitive microphones and then compares the sound waves produced by each flight.
Photo credit: WDWF https://wpblink.com/wallpaper-572646
The BBC video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02kqgpf
Sources: http://bit.ly/1BjemM7
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barred_life
Part 3 🎬
Wildlife cinematography. Birding. Obsession. A whole new level of fun. Video showcasing a beautiful barred owl in mealtime mode😁🐍
Shot on @canonus 📷 and mounted on @GitzoInspires tripod 📐Thanks for flying @barred_life ✈️🙏💕
Source: instagram.com
natgeo
Video by Bertie Gregory @bertiegregory | A male snowy owl hunts for lemmings during a blizzard along Hudson Bay in Canada. I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes, but this snowy owl looked totally unfazed by the brutal conditions. Feathers evolved initially for insulation, not flight, so by trapping pockets of air in his plumage, he’s able to stay warm and focus on other tasks. Before this shoot, I would have said hunting in a blizzard would be pointless for this owl, as I thought its small rodent prey would be tucked up under the snow. Even if the lemmings were on the move underground, there’s no way the owl could hear them in this wind. However, occasionally we did see lemmings running around on top of the snow, presumably disorientated and lost. With the owls razor-sharp eyesight, this would be a lemming’s last mistake.
Source: instagram.com
earthstory reblogged
My mom took these when a hunting barred owl came close enough to the house for pics. It never did dive on anything, but boy was it looking! Chuffed us to bits that you could see sapping buckets in some pics too.
raptor_rehab_of_kentucky
Luna says: it’s Friday!!!! She is our most vocal Educational Great Horned Owl. You can also hear the Ospreys in Rehabilitation in the background. ———————————————-
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earthstory reblogged
Great Horned Owl, McNary WLR. We kept trying to follow this bird to get a better shot, but it was faster, and smarter than us. After about 30 minutes of running across this field, in the heat we just decided that it wasn’t worth taking a picture of (right). Getting old sucks. Imagine 3 middle age people with 30lbs of camera gear running across a field of desert in 85 degree heat, and you get the picture. 25 August 2018.
exploreorg Owlet takes a leap of faith! The Great Horned Owl chicks have been branching out into the world the past few days. Mom and dad are still feeding them for the time being, but they're growing up so fast aren't they?
raptor_rehab_of_kentucky A.J., one of our educational Barn Owls, likes to supervise while we clean his mew enclosure. He is doing something called “Toe Dusting”. It is a territorial and sometimes defensive dance to make sure we know that this is his territory.
Original caption:
Three friends ride bicycles 192 miles through the California desert, from Badwater Basin to White Mt. Peak. Along the way they ascend over 24,000 vertical feet, and experience a 70 degrees shift in temperature. Before embarking the riders plan their ride carefully and leave food and water along the route in old ammunition canisters for later consumption. Unsupported from beginning to end, the riders carried small cameras and filmed themselves during the ride, capturing serendipitous moments like a dusk flyby of a group of owls and a desperate dive into a grungy bathroom to escape from the cold.
Directed by Brian Vernor Executive Produced by James Lalonde Supported by Cannondale Bicycles Shot on super 16mm, super 8mm, and various HD digital cameras. Cinematography by Kenny Sule, Izzy Cohan & Brian Vernor Score by Analogpeople.tv
natgeo Video by @joelsartore | The Ural owl’s four-foot wingspan allows it to glide gracefully from perch to perch as it scans the ground for smaller animals to hunt. Any surplus food the owl catches is stored either in its nest or in nearby spaces for later. Males of this species claim their territory by singing from their perch, and mates can be heard dueting during courtship. These beautiful birds of prey live in deciduous forests in Northern Europe through northern Russia and Siberia all the way to Korea and Japan.
Slow motion of owls taking off to jump after food.
Some beautiful photos
Having recently shared images from the Nikon Small World (see http://bit.ly/2xQdOHd), the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2017 awards (see http://bit.ly/2ipNvkn), the Royal Society of Biology’s 2017 Photographer of the Year and Young Photographer of the Year competitions (see http://bit.ly/2gQNUfg) and the Geological Society of London's Our Restless Earth (http://bit.ly/2m1FcMS) in that time of the annual news cycle when many such events announce their honours more or less simultaneously. Here to conclude the series we have some of the British Wildlife Photography awards winners for this year. Over a hundred of the photos are on show at the mall galleries in London.
We start with a magical morning in the woods of Derbyshire with a mist floating around silver birches at Bolehill Quarry in the Peak District national park. Our next is of the beginning of a short eared owl's day, aka our dusk as it emerged to hunt. The eerie green creatures in the third are hydras living in a pond (see http://bit.ly/2hazx1H) in the photographer's garden, each one but a few mm across as they hang off the underside of a lilypad waiting to snare prey in their poisoned tentacles. The portrait of a naughty gannet from a cliff top was taken in the Isle of Noss, one of the Shetlands whilst the Brock (an old name for badgers) is clearly enjoying a magical evening's scratch in the dying rays of the sun.
Loz Image credit: 1: Francis Joseph Taylor, 2: Matthew Roseveare , 3: Alex Hyde, 4: Melvin Redeker , 5: Andrew Parkinson /British Wildlife Photography Awards 2017 https://www.bwpawards.org/ http://bit.ly/2AhIfmk
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It's the biologists turn
Having recently shared images from the Nikon Small World (see http://bit.ly/2xQdOHd) and the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2017 awards (see http://bit.ly/2ipNvkn), here are some photos from the Royal Society of Biology’s 2017 Photographer of the Year and Young Photographer of the Year competitions in a week of the year that seems to have all these events announcing their honours more or less simultaneously.
Our first photo shows a Blakiston’s fish owl, one of the rarest species with 20 breeding pairs remaining on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, here caught hunting fish corralled in the stream's eddy in midwinter. Our next shows the overall winner, an insect crawling up a mushroom in a Scottish forest. The third is of a 2mm springtail in Holland sitting atop a blade of grass, our fourth a tiny froglet about to emerge from its 5mm egg in India's Western Ghats while our last features two damselflies in China peering over the leaves. All in all the exhibition features some lovely images of the living world.
Loz
Image credit: 1: Peter Burkill 2: DMCNAUGHTPHOTOGRAPHY 3:Marc Brouwer 4: Anup Deodhar 5: Miao Yong/2017 Royal Society of Biology Photographer of the Year
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natgeo video by @joelsartore | This Malay eagle owl was photographed at Jurong Bird Park, part of Wildlife Reserves Singapore (@wrs.ig). This species can be found in the Malay Peninsula in Southeast Asia and prey on large insects, birds, small mammals and reptiles. It’s likely that they mate for life and they’ve been known to become very attached to their nesting locations. In many instances the owls will return to their site year after year, and if one mate dies the other will continue to maintain the same territory. For a portrait of this owl, check out @joelsartore.