The silence of the owls

https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/technology/2020/how-owls-fly-without-making-a-sound?MvBriefArticleId=702

by prostoalex • 6 years ago

100 53 6 years ago

the owls are not what they seem

symmitchry• 6 years ago

I was attacked by a huge owl recently. It drew blood, and really hurt. I can confirm it was entirely silent, in contrast to being attacked by a crow, which makes an almost-avoidable swooshing sound.

junke2• 6 years ago

On the internet, nobody knows you are a mouse.

gms• 6 years ago

While this place isn't a hotbed of humour, this may be the funniest comment I have come across in over 13 years of reading HN.

DrScump• 6 years ago

As it turns out, owls and mice are not always enemies:

https://www.pbs.org/video/film-school-shorts-program-owl-and...

paloaltokid• 6 years ago

Were you out walking at night? Do you have any sense of why it attacked you? (I don't know anything about owls)

zellyn• 6 years ago

Out of curiosity, besides owls and crows, have you been attacked by any other taloned birds?

HoveringOrb• 6 years ago

It was probably a harpy. Those things have no chill.

voz_• 6 years ago

What led to this? Please don't leave us hanging.

gnulinux• 6 years ago

Why would an owl attack a huge mammal like a human? Are you a particularly short person? Do owls attack other large mammals like deers, horses, bears etc? That's very scary.

dmoy• 6 years ago

Sometimes your hair or hat can look like a tasty meal. Sometimes it's territorial, if you're getting too close to a nest or whatever. Usually it's one of those two.

LiamPa• 6 years ago

Owls are extremely territorial, even small owls like tawnys have been recorded attacking/bombing humans when coming too close to a nest site.

PaulHoule• 6 years ago

I think most owls are afraid of humans but birds have intimidation power above their weight and if an owl learns it can push people around it might keep doing so.

mongol• 6 years ago

Like others have said, they are territorial and they protect their young. You need to be quite careful. The Ural Owl is no joke, it cannot kill you, but it can destroy your sight because it is known to attack the eyes.

pvaldes2• 6 years ago

To defend their nest, of course. They don't make prisoners and aim for the face and eyes of anybody trying to steal eggs or owlets.

But most owls nest in big threes high above the soil, so the probability of an attack is really low. Probably there was a fallen owlet hidden close to you.

rcurry2• 6 years ago

I got hit by an owl one night while calling coyotes - I was sitting in thick brush, wearing a furry bomber hat and using a mouth call that simulates a distressed rodent. I got lucky and it just grabbed the hat, but it sure surprised the hell out of me and after that I switched to an electronic caller for night hunting. After I bought a night vision rig I was astonished to learn how many owls were swooping on my sets at night.

rurp• 6 years ago

I would think it's extremely rare. I recently frightened an enormous great horned owl that had a baby in its nest. Rather than attack, the parent flew to another cliff which set off a bunch of smaller birds cawing and swooping at it. It was a huge commotion and the owl was getting dive bombed relentlessly, but the parent owl held its ground, drawing attention away from its baby. I have a ton of respect for that animal.

1e-9• 6 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809199

srikz• 6 years ago

This video about Biomimicry is a great accompaniment for this article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMtXqTmfta0

nigerian1981• 6 years ago

Great video thanks for sharing

starpilot• 6 years ago

Bird wings are actually optimized for different Reynolds numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number). More flapping for smaller birds/insects, more gliding for larger (they fly like airplanes almost).

und3rth3iP• 6 years ago

Ever since learned that owls are mostly made up of feathers, I haven't been the same.

coldcode• 6 years ago

I always wondered if one could build a drone as quiet as an owl.

maxwell• 6 years ago

Came to the comments hoping to hear about applying owl science to drones.

filoeleven2• 6 years ago

This isn’t owl science, nor is it quiet, but it is an ornithopter that uses bird wing biomimicry. It’s also the most fun RC flyer I’ve ever used. It’s similar to flying a RC plane, only it’s slower and will glide instead of dropping if you cut the throttle, so for me it’s a lot less panicky.

https://bionicbird.com/usa/product/metafly

seshagiric• 6 years ago

To really appreciate how silent Owls are as compared to other birds, see this excellent video from BBC:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_FEaFgJyfA

marai2• 6 years ago

Thank you for sharing this video. While I had only skimmed the article, the video is incredible and I'm so glad someone shared it!

gibolt• 6 years ago

They mention its light body without explaining how. You should Google "Naked Owl" and see just how little their body actually is. Most of what you see is just fluffy feathers

Ididntdothis2• 6 years ago

Be careful with searches that have the “n” word. I once saw a picture of a bear that had lost its hair due to a skin problem and wanted to show it to a colleague. So I searched for “naked bear” which didn’t end well.

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

I wonder if there's an 'engineering tradeoff' to their quiet flight. Would they be quicker/more efficient if they weren't constrained to be quiet?

I suppose it's unlikely we have a clear answer to this.

KineticLensman2• 6 years ago

Many owl feathers lack preen oil, meaning they are less waterproof than other birds, increasing mortality in cold wet weather. Prolonged rain is very bad for many owls.

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

Interesting. Is this an adaptation to increase their stealthiness?

ajuc• 6 years ago

If owl wings are more like plane than like other birds' wings (because they keep feathers together more) - then maybe planes already have these advantages built-in?

nullc2• 6 years ago

There are some horned owls that seem spend a lot of time on my property at night. We like listening to them Who Who at each other.

Sometime last year one swooped over me while I was outside, I had no idea it was there until it was feet away and it was gigantic. Startled the hell out of me.

Only time I've ever actually seen them. I'd love to get some photographs of them but because they move so silently they're hard to find.

Baeocystin• 6 years ago

I used to live on a ranch, lots of open space and a few tall trees near my house. I decided to get a cheap night-vision monocular to check for coyotes before I let my dogs out in the evening. The first night, just looking around for fun, I was shocked by the huge owls that were living in the trees, and flying around looking for prey. They had learned to take flight as soon as I opened the door, the noise + running dogs frequently kicking up a scurrying meal for them. I'd lived there for a year, and had no idea. You couldn't hear a thing, even with them swooping in for a kill just feet away. It was incredible to watch!

nullc2• 6 years ago

I now feel stupid. I have a LWIR camera. I can find the owls.

One of the big revelations from our security cameras is how much animal activity that goes on which we'd otherwise have no idea about. We're visited almost every night by skunks, racoons, and foxes... but we only see them first hand a couple times a year.

chrisbennet• 6 years ago

I had a pet owl one summer. It would perch on my arm. It used to land on my sisters window and walk back and forth to get fed I guess. (We had windows that pivot up and out.)

tobmlt• 6 years ago

Good stuff. This reminds me of the "added mass swimmer" -- theoretical propulsion purely by the added mass effect, avoiding the shedding of vortices (with the propulsion device working in water, or any suitably heavy fluid). The navy has been funding studies into it for a while. Not going to work for an owl though. Air is not heavy enough.

rcurry2• 6 years ago

A couple of other interesting things about owls - they can’t move their eyes, which is why they have a few extra vertebrae that allow them to swing their heads around so far, and some owls have offset ears that allow them to calculate a glide path toward their prey, kind of similar to how aircraft use ILS to stay on a glide path for landing.

jay-anderson• 6 years ago

Owls can make some noise when they want to as well. My grandparents had an old abandoned silo on their property that we knew some barn owls were roosting in. We went out at dusk to watch them. It was amazing how quiet and graceful they were. But they didn't like us being there and swooped down to yelled at us a few times. Since we didn't hear them coming and it was quiet out they took us by surprise and really made us jump.

It was also neat looking through their pellets at the bottom of the silo to see what bones were recognizable.

The silence of the owls

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