This owl is an ambush hunter.
What makes her so deadly?
She’s not the fastest, but she has a different advantage.
It's stealth, not speed that makes her lethal.
Compare this owl to a falcon.
Both animals are birds of prey. But they have really different strategies
when it comes to hunting.
The falcon hunts when it's light out.
He’s incredibly fast. Some falcons fly up to 200 miles per hour.
They don’t need to be quiet.
By the time their prey hears them it’s already too late.
But owls have another strategy.
They hunt under the cover of darkness. They’re sneaky.
She has incredibly powerful night-vision.
And she can zero in on the location of even the smallest noise.
Air rushes over her wings as she flies.
In most birds, that’s noisy. But with owls, there’s almost no flapping sound, no rustling.
It’s... quiet.
Up close, you can see how she does it.
Her feathers are velvety, soft.
That furriness lets the feathers slip quietly past each other during flight… dampen sound
like a soft blanket.
Compare that to a falcon feathers.
They’re sleek and aerodynamic, but noisy as they slice through the air.
And here’s another thing.
See those projections along the leading edge of the owl’s wing... like a pointy comb?
Those break up the wind as it flows over the top of the wing
The feathers at the trailing edge of the wing break up the wind even more.
Compared to a falcon, these feathers look kind of jagged, right?
But that jaggedness means almost no whooshing sound that would alert their prey.
And overall... owl wings are bigger, wider than a pointy falcon wing.
So they’re slower, but they have more lift.
The owl doesn’t need to flap them as often. Less flapping means… less noise.
We often fear what’s fast. Speed and danger seem to go hand in hand.
But owls have given up on racing through the day to become champions
of sneaking through the night.
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