infuriating myths about owls still prevail!

It seems I've been inundated with people parroting the myths about owls, long, long, long after those myths have been discovered to be completely false. And I'm so frustrated. When I was a teenager and my family decided to explode into a million unrecognizeable pieces, JUST as I was starting college and trying to adjust and do well academically, I used to sometimes drive off to somewhere secluded and just scream and pound the stearing wheel (after I'd parked). Thisi seemed a better way to handle my frustrations than doing drugs or alcohol, which would only make things worse.

Sometimes I feel like going off somewhere and screaming when I hear owls so terribly represented. Yeah, I guess I'm emotionally involved!

I heard this guy on TV last week talking about how owls are "stupid" and don't want any affection in their lives, hate to be touched, and he even said they had bad eyesight! What was he thinking? To make matters worse, he was an owl trainer! But not a scientist.

A few years ago I was visiting one of my Caltech mentors when I told him about a zoo director who had gone on TV and proclaimed w/ great confidence that "owls hunt using echolocation, just like bats!". I was so frustrated. They do NOT have any form of echolocation! For years and decades and decades we've known that owls hunt using sound alone. Their hearing system is almost unmatched and their feathers are completely silent in flight so that nothing interferes w/ their ability to hear their prey accurately. Even their faces are perfectly formed to funnel sound into their ears like satellite dishes. In fact, if you clip away a section of feathers on their face, they will either overshoot or undershoot when trying to home in on prey.

I ranted and raved to my mentor, who remained completely calm. His only answer was, "But he is not a scientist, Stacey!" For him, that was reason enough to be wrong and to declare it from the rooftop of national television. But it was not enough for me. Was this guy so surrounded w/ yes people that no one ever told him he was wrong? Was he completely incurious about how owls really hunt? I'll never know.

And here I was again, years later, seeing yet another "owl expert" on TV tallking trash about these amazingly intelligent, highly affectionate, awesomely visioned wild souls. AAAARRRGGGG!

A friend of mine saw it, too, and called me, all worked up. "Can you believe it? I can't believe it!" she groused.

Ok. So let me just say for the record what is TRUE.

Owls have AMAZING eyesight. Their eyesight is far superior to ours because they have a reflective layer behind the retina that reflects light back onto the retina, so that they can see in extremely low light. There are other reasons their eyesight is superior, such as the way in which cells are grouped on the retina, the relative size of the retina to the brain, and the brain structures that process the images.

Owls are HIGHLY INTELLIGENT! I suspect that this guy was actually trying to say that owls are hard to train. THAT is true. They have their own minds and, although they may understand what you say, they do not have a need to do our bidding. Nope, not even for a reward. They are not puppies! They are very independently minded wild animals, which is why I love them so much! You have to EARN your relationship w/ an owl and he may decide that you're not good enough for him at any time, if you screw up by showing your temper or by being ignorant with him. For example, many people say, "Shhh shh shh shh" to a human baby to calm the baby. That works w/ humans but to an owl, you're HISSING AT HIM! So he just gets more and more upset. That doesn't make HIM stupid, it makes the human stupid, or at least ignorant of the way of owls in some manner.

Birds are among the most intelligent of all animals. This is a fairly new concept, as we used to think that brain size was directly linked to intelligence. Now we know that's not true! Parrots and crows have an IQ roughly equal to that of a 5 to 7 year old human, and in fact can outclass humans in some areas of problem solving and reasoning. Wesley showed me that owls are in the same category when he learned to understand much of what I said, and even varied his normal owl sounds to create his owl repertoire of new sounds which had specific meanings. In order to do that, he had to first learn that my words meant something, then realize that sounds could have meaning, then decide he wanted to communicate with ME, then figure out a way to do that using sound. Pretty darn smart!

I'd like to do the whole thing again - start with a baby barn owl (I'd have to get a new permit since Wesley's permit was only for him as long as he was alive), and this time, I'd want to document/film every new step as it happened. With Wesley, I had no idea this was going to happen so I was always about 2 steps behind him in realizing what he was up to!

How about that big ol' myth that owls hate to be touched? This is possibly the most egregious of the myths because those who believe it raise owls in captivity in a world completely devoid of all affection! And what happens when you raise any being in a cold world w/ no touch? The being becomes aloof, alone, depressed, and afraid of touch. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you observe owls in the wild, they spend hours a day cuddling, allopreening (grooming each other), snuggling. We could learn from them how crucial affection is to the health of sentient beings! Why would they be any different in captivity? They're not.

Wesley and I snuggled every day. He would leap into my arms and snuggle down, closing his eyes and making little tiny cuddle sounds. I would pet, preen, and cuddle with him. In fact, we fell asleep almost every night like that - him lying in my arms and me stroking his feathers. He fit right in the crook of my arm and we would walk around like that, with him pulling up his talons like landing gear. He craved and demanded affection from me, just as he would have from a mate in the wild.

They are so emotionally attached to their mate in the wild, that if the mate dies, owls will sometimes will themselves to die rather than finding a new mate. It depends on the individual owl's temperament and how long the mates were together. Owls have also been known to care for a sick mate for years, even, doing all the hunting and feeding the ailing mate. Hawks have also been known to do the same.

So, when you see a so called expert on TV telling you that owls are stupid, unaffectionate, hunt by echolocation, or have poor eyesight, just remember, they don't actually know the truth about owls. If it's a trainer, he's probably expressing his frustration at how they are almost unwilling to be trained. If it's a zoo person, they are just parroting what they've been told. If it's a rehabber, they may know how to rehab an animal, but it doesn't mean they have all the latest scientific knowledge at their fingertips.