<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" >1, a weird and mysterious owl</h1>
Owls are actually birds with a very low sense of existence, and many people have basically never seen their true faces, but in the countryside, they do live near people, even close by, but you just can't find it.
The only sign we can detect is judged by sound, if you hear, a long grunting sound that lasts a second or two, sometimes before calling, there is a rhythm similar to clearing your throat a few times. This is basically the cry of an ordinary owl, and its voice does sound strange, especially when a person walks on a country road, the more he listens to it, the more maddening he becomes.
But there is an old saying in the countryside, called not afraid of owls, afraid of owls laughing, it can be seen that the owl's call is only entry-level, if you hear its laughter, many times it represents the arrival of bad luck, so the owl is also called the bird of mourning.
There is also a saying called: Night owls come into the house, uninvited, and talk about owls, and the ones who are most afraid of owls are the old people. It is rumored that as long as you hear its laughter, it heralds the arrival of the god of death!
Owls are native birds of our country, and have long been recorded in ancient times, and the Han Dynasty's "Explanation of Words" has such a sentence about owls: Owl, not filial piety birds also. Day, catch the owl.
In the vernacular, the owl is an unfilial bird, and if it is found during the day, it will be caught, killed and chopped to pieces, and the purpose of this is to cut off the ominous bad luck.
Qing Dynasty scholars also commented on the word "no filial piety" in this sentence, and the answer given was: eating mother, that is, owl eating its own mother. No wonder owl nicknames are ugly: night owls, soul birds, ghost-faced birds, mourning birds, unfilial birds, and so on.
It may be the reason why the average person has little contact with owls, or it may be the reason why the ancients were difficult to explain some phenomena. But can the "crimes" imposed on them by human beings really be justified? Do owls really need to bear so much "infamy"?
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="32" >2, unique to the owl</h1>
Realistically, there must be a reasonable scientific explanation behind any seemingly unusual phenomenon, and if you want to demystify the owl, you must first understand its uniqueness from head to toe.
The first impression of the owl is that a pair of oversized eyes, look very special, on the one hand, the pupils are large and black under the cover of night, even in the daytime, the whites of the eyes are yellow, orange, or even completely black, so it looks really crazy.
But in fact, its eyes are also evolved according to the night environment, its pupils can absorb light, even in the weak light can see things in the distance, plus can see three-dimensional objects, so the night vision ability is very powerful.
Although the owl is colorblind, this feature can be ignored at night and even helps it hunt. Rat hunting is a piece of cake for it, and even eagle-like birds of prey are reduced to owls due to poor night vision.
The owl's ears are also relatively unique, one high and one low, the left ear has a well-developed ear drum, the ear canal is wider than the right ear, and the two clusters of ear feathers on the top of the head are used to collect sound, which can distinguish the source of lateral and vertical sound. So its hearing is very sensitive, and sometimes it turns its head after hearing the sound, which is to distinguish where the prey is. The most unique thing is that you can open its ears and you can still see its eyeballs.
Its feathers are also different from many birds, the feathers at the edges of the wings are jagged in structure, very tough, can stabilize the air flow during flight, reduce noise, and achieve silent flight. The face feathers show a state of outward paving, so that it has a flat face, coupled with the all-black pupils, it looks like a "grimace", which is very scary.
If its head rotates 270 degrees at this time, anyone will be scared to pee! This difficult action can be achieved thanks to the construction of the owl's 14 cervical vertebrae, and the long neck is very flexible. Not only that, but its legs are also very long, basically half of its height, and it can also show a "sitting" posture, but these "secrets" are covered by feathers and invisible.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="33" >3, decrypt the owl</h1>
The owl's unique features make it seem incompatible with the universal cognition of human beings, it comes and goes without a trace, its voice is extremely strange, its face is extremely frightening, in fact, their crimes are only imposed by humans.
The previous article said that the owl eats the mother, and some people say that the owl will spit out a hairball before dying, in fact, both of them have a certain relationship with its eating habits.
There is a term called "saliva residue", which refers to the fact that some predators vomit out parts that cannot digest prey, and what is spit out is saliva. It contains the fur, bones, teeth and other parts of the digested animal, and the ancients could not explain it after seeing the saliva residue, and mistakenly thought that it had eaten its own mother. In fact, cats have similar divine operations.
As for the owl being able to "predict" death, it is called "mourning bird" and "soul bird", which is actually a legend, and it has been since ancient times, and there are many versions under word of mouth.
The most terrifying version is that the owl will make a cry in front of the window of the dying person, but this sound sounds like a kind of laughter, each laugh represents counting one of the old man's eyebrows, and when the number of eyebrows is counted, the hour is also up, so the old man in ancient times was most afraid of hearing the laughter of the owl!
The explanation given by the predecessors is that owls like to eat carrion, are more sensitive to the taste of carrion, can detect the rotten smell emitted from the dead person at a great distance, they will think that there is food to eat, and they have been looking for it nearby, and the closest to the old man is the window.
With the cry of the owl, within a few days someone here will die, and if this happens several times, people will be impressed, and the "hat" of the mourning bird will be pulled down.
From a scientific point of view, the ancients' statement is not unreasonable, the owl's hearing is indeed very sharp, the auditory nerve cells reached 95,000, and at the same time has excellent vision, can see everything around it, as for being able to smell the smell of the terminally ill person, it remains to be confirmed.
But what is certain is that an owl can eat more than 1,000 rats a year, which is equivalent to protecting tons of food for humans, and is a veritable beneficial bird, a pastoral guard, and a national second-level protected animal.
It is only when they lie down at night, which is the opposite of human schedules, coupled with strange cries, frightening appearances, and unexplained behaviors, that many misunderstandings will occur. Nowadays, owls have also become hot pets, in fact, under the appearance of indifference, there is also a cute and funny side.
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