The Great Gray Owl Probably Has Bigger Eyes Than You
But having such huge peepers comes with pros and cons.
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Transcript:
This is BirdNote!
An owl鈥檚 gaze is uniquely penetrating. Peer into an owl鈥檚 face 鈥 there is something almost human about its large, forward-facing eyes. Just how big are those eyes? They are astonishingly large in proportion to the size of the owl鈥檚 head. A Great Gray Owl, which stands two feet tall and weighs 2陆 pounds, has eyes larger than those of most humans!
And while an owl鈥檚 eyes may look human, their capabilities are superhuman. Enormous eyes help owls to see in near darkness. An owl鈥檚 retinal anatomy is similar to that of cats, which rival owls in seeing in dim light. Owls see well in daylight, too, but their color vision is probably very limited. And the evolution of such large eyes has required a behavioral compromise: an owl鈥檚 eyes are fixed in their sockets, so the bird must rotate its neck to look around. One ornithologist has described owls鈥 heads as 鈥渓ittle more than brains with raptorial beaks and the largest possible eyes and ears attached.鈥
To see a photo of this bird 鈥 and all we feature on the show鈥 come to our website, BirdNote.org. Sign up for the podcast, too. I鈥檓 Michael Stein.
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Credits:
Producer: John Kessler
Executive Producer: Chris Peterson
Written by Bob Sundstrom
Narrator: Michael Stein
Call of the Great Gray Owl provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. Female contact call and male territorial call recorded by L.J. Peyton.
漏 2012 Tune In to Nature.org November 2017 ID# 110606GGOW1-2KPLU owl-04b
* (Johnsgard 42) Quotation from Johnsgard, Paul A. North American Owls: Biology and Natural History. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.