Rumors about "night owls entering the house and coming without anything" have abounded since ancient times, and owls are notorious in Chinese folk.
In the Han Dynasty's "Commentaries on the Interpretation of Texts", it was once recorded that :"Owl, not filial piety to birds also." Day, catch the owl. ”
This means that the owl is an unfilial bird (mother-eater), and seeing them during the day is very ominous, it should be captured and cut into pieces, so as to cut off the bad luck and comfort the heavens.
Of course, all the views about ominous owls are feudal superstitions and rumors, they do not eat mothers, there is no great evil, at most it is not harmonious in appearance.
White-faced horned owl Ptilopsis leucotis
<h1>The so-called "mourning bird"</h1>
There is also a rumor about owls, it is said that if someone in the family is about to die, the owl will fly over and perch on the nearby branches, emit a miserable laugh, and extend a proverb: "If you are not afraid of the owl, you are afraid of the owl laughing."
This phenomenon is explained by some half-hanging science authors as:
Owls have an extremely sensitive sense of smell and can smell rotten food, and "supposedly" terminally ill dying people emit the same smell, so the owl will smell and come to see if there is anything to eat.
This view seems to explain the rumor of the owl "reporting the funeral", but it is a rather absurd wrong view, resulting in the old rumor not being broken, and the new rumor being born again.
Ichratene whitneyi
<h1>Refute new rumors? Why bother</h1>
Because this statement itself creates two false views:
First, owls have an extremely sensitive sense of smell. This is wrong, Owl birds are typical visual and auditory predatory birds of prey, do not rely on smell to prey, and the sense of smell is not very sensitive, which we will explain in detail later.
Second, the dying man smells of rotting corpses. And the scribblers who spread this pseudoscience also created a new word called "carrion amine", which seems to be very scientific, but it is actually made up. If you look it up, you will know that the whole content of this word is related to owls, and there is no scientific, professional theoretical basis, which is very strange.
Jamaican Owl Pseudodoscops grammicus
Leaving aside the dying, even the real dead have a process of decay.
Before decaying, the corpse undergoes steps such as muscle relaxation, stiffness, cooling, and re-softening, and even in the summer, it takes at least 24 hours for local decay under the action of microorganisms to gradually spread.
If a person is not dead, he cannot smell of decomposing corpses, let alone attract owls to come and forage for food, unless the cause is pushed to the "mysterious atmosphere of death" and other rogue brainless statements.
The reason why the famous "heavenly burials" have vultures circling before they are dead is because they have established a strong reflex association and have been wandering around the sky burial platform for many years.
仓鸮These albums
<h1>The flexible neck of a night vision master</h1>
Well, let's talk about the way owls hunt.
Since owls are almost always diurnal and nocturnal animals, they have evolved a very complete nocturnal predation strategy and have made many specializations around this strategy in terms of physical characteristics.
First of all, the owl's eyeballs are large, and they are directly in front of the face, forming binocular vision, which can overlap the field of view, generate stereoscopic images, accurately grasp the distance between different objects in the line of sight and themselves, and the night vision ability is quite excellent.
Because the eyeball is supported by a strong scleral ring, the owl cannot move the eyeball at will, but has evolved an extremely flexible 14-section cervical vertebrae, which can rotate the head 270 degrees with almost no visual dead angle.
Chestnut owl Phodilus badius
<h1>True "tailwind ears"</h1>
The so-called night vision ability, in fact, is to say that in the condition of only weak light can still maintain the maximum degree of clear vision, if it is absolutely dark, night vision ability will be reduced no matter how good.
So what if the weather is not good at night, and you really can't see your five fingers? There is a way.
Owls are not only adept at using their vision to lock on to their prey, but also have a well-developed sense of hearing. If you take a closer look at the close-up photo of the owl's face in the picture accompanying this article, you should be able to see that the owl's face is very flat, and the facial feathers are extremely fine and radial.
In the book "The Owl of Taiwan" by Lin Wenlong and Zeng Yishuo, it is mentioned that the flat and wide face and radial feathers of the owl are very sensitive to air vibration (the nature of sound), which can help improve the sensitivity and accuracy of the owl to sound wave collection.
Ulin Owl Strix nebulosa
<h1>Asymmetrical binaural canals</h1>
Many species of owls have a pair of "cat ears", which are not actually external ears, just feathers.
This pair of long ear tufts is actually an extension of the radial feathers of the face near the top of the head, which is also helpful for converging and distinguishing the source of sound, and in general, the more dependent the owl that relies on sound to hunt, the more developed the ear tuft feathers.
Another interesting point of knowledge is that the owl's pair of ear holes are not symmetrical, and the ear holes on the left and right sides of the head are asymmetrical in terms of position and size, and this asymmetry can even extend inward to the middle ear and the inner ear.
When the sound comes, the owl can detect the subtle time difference between the sound waves entering the left and right asymmetrical ear canals, and at the same time fine-tune the head, which can more accurately distinguish the direction and distance of the sound source, and even the size and intensity of the animal that emits the sound to determine whether the sound is a prey that can be caught.
Big Eagle Owl Bubo Virginianus
<h1>Silent hunter-killer</h1>
In addition, the owl's feathers are very fine and soft, even if the texture of the primary flight feathers is harder, each feather has a jagged fine hair at the end, which can quickly disperse the wind and air flow generated by flapping wings, achieving excellent silencer effect.
The owl's high degree of enhancement of sight and hearing makes them powerful and silent predators:
First use hearing and vision to double lock the prey, and then quietly fly over and descend from the sky, attack the prey with the claws belonging to the bird of prey, and kill in one blow.
There are gains and losses, and the reinforcement of hearing and vision weakens the owl's sense of smell, but this is not a problem, because the owl does not rely on smell, and hearing and vision are sufficient.
So the rumors at the beginning of the article can also be broken - what sense of smell is sensitive, what can smell the rotten corpse smell emitted by the dying person, pull it down.
Megalod owl Mimizuku gurneyi