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The silence of the owls
- intellectronica 6y agothe owls are not what they seem
- symmitchry 6y agoI 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.
- junke 6y agoOn the internet, nobody knows you are a mouse.
- gms 6y agoWhile 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.
- junke 6y agoThanks a lot
- gkoberger 6y agoAgreed, as do some others! https://twitter.com/gkoberger/status/1263172182412165120 https://twitter.com/gkoberger/status/1263172182412165120
- jonshariat 6y agoWhenever I make any kind of attempt at humor on HN, I get downvoted and told that this isn't the place for jokes but serious discussion. Since the quality of the comments on HN are why I come back every day, I don't disagree.
- DrScump 6y agoAs it turns out, owls and mice are not always enemies: https://www.pbs.org/video/film-school-shorts-program-owl-and-mouse-film-school-shorts/ https://www.pbs.org/video/film-school-shorts-program-owl-and...
- paloaltokid 6y agoWere you out walking at night? Do you have any sense of why it attacked you? (I don't know anything about owls)
- zellyn 6y agoOut of curiosity, besides owls and crows, have you been attacked by any other taloned birds?
- HoveringOrb 6y agoIt was probably a harpy. Those things have no chill.
- zbrozek 6y agoI got accidentally attacked by a hawk of some sort. I was walking on a university campus pathway and got thwacked by a hawk jumping off of a pole. Turns out I was merely between it and its prey - it was about to swoop a squirrel. It bounced off me, ignored my existence entirely, and kept chasing the squirrel. Knocked me a bit off balance, but the bird appeared fine and so was I.
- voz_ 6y agoWhat led to this? Please don't leave us hanging.
- gnulinux 6y agoWhy 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 6y agoSometimes 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.
- goatinaboat 6y agoSometimes your hair or hat can look like a tasty meal Yes do you remember this owl? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/06/owl-attacks-joggers-and-steals-their-hats https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/06/owl-atta...
- Judgmentality 6y agoA long time ago, when I had much longer hair and would go running just about every day, there was a block on my route where a bird would swoop down constantly and attack me. I think it thought my hair was a bunch of worms or something. It was a smaller bird, it couldn't really hurt me, but fuck that thing flying around my face was terrifying. I quickly changed routes once I realized it wasn't going to stop.
- LiamPa 6y agoOwls are extremely territorial, even small owls like tawnys have been recorded attacking/bombing humans when coming too close to a nest site.
- pvaldes 6y agoTawnys are know to be responsible of attacks leading to one-eyed humans.
- PaulHoule 6y agoI 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.
- 1e-9 6y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22809199
- srikz 6y agoThis video about Biomimicry is a great accompaniment for this article https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMtXqTmfta0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMtXqTmfta0
- nigerian1981 6y agoGreat video thanks for sharing
- starpilot 6y agoBird wings are actually optimized for different Reynolds numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number). More flapping for smaller birds/insects, more gliding for larger (they fly like airplanes almost).
- und3rth3iP 6y agoEver since learned that owls are mostly made up of feathers, I haven't been the same.
- coldcode 6y agoI always wondered if one could build a drone as quiet as an owl.
- maxwell 6y agoCame to the comments hoping to hear about applying owl science to drones.
- filoeleven 6y agoThis 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 https://bionicbird.com/usa/product/metafly
- dmitrygr 6y agoAll planes (RC and real) will glide if you chop the power. none of them just fall. source: am pilot (real and RC)
- filoeleven 6y agoFair enough. Perhaps the higher reaction times needed for RC planes in general along with the several years that have passed since I last flew one have clouded my memory. I had lots of fun with the plane too, don’t get me wrong! The MetaFly is just more my speed, I guess.
- chrisbennet 6y agoI 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.)
- seshagiric 6y agoTo 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_FEaFgJyfA
- marai2 6y agoThank 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 6y agoThey 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
- Ididntdothis 6y agoBe 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.
- sk0g 6y agoBear is a gay "trope" or whatever it's called, so I would never make that query as is! Might have had better luck with "naked bear -gay -man"?
- Ididntdothis 6y agoI guess this was a TIL for me :-)
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoI 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.
- KineticLensman 6y agoMany 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.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoInteresting. Is this an adaptation to increase their stealthiness?
- KineticLensman 6y agoExactly
- ajuc 6y agoIf 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?
- nullc 6y agoThere 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 6y agoI 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!
- nullc 6y agoI 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.
- tobmlt 6y agoGood 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.
- rcurry 6y agoA 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 6y agoOwls 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.