From Donna Feledichuk
This image is only possible because I was using a 400mm f2.8 lens and due to countless hours of practice in photographing great gray owls. To get all the detail and not have blur in the wings shooting at lower shutter speeds at dusk is from tons of practice in the field. Opportunities for backlighting on great gray owls are not frequent. The weather needs to cooperate not always the case in the north and the owl needs to be in the right position. This image is about technical skill, fieldcraft and knowledge coming together in a single frame.
Are owls spread across the entire planet? I wonder if they fly between continents
Owls are just about everywhere except Antarctica. Redwood forest, jungle, desert, frozen waste, islands, cities-they all have owls.
Owls have been around since (edit for clarification)
the end of the dinosaursjust after the age of dinosaurs, around 60-65 million years ago , so they’ve had a lot of time and different opportunities to move around and evolve thanks to so much geological time. We have owls in the Andaman Islands, 80 miles / 130 km off of India that probably made their way over there when there was a land bridge. A descendant of the Eurasian Eagle owl probably crossed from Russia to Alaska, becoming the Great Horned Owl. The other day we covered the Burrowing Owl of Aruba, the Shoco. Hawaii has the Pueo, a type of Short Eared Owl. There are varieties of Scops and Barn owls across all the inhabited continents.As for do they still fly between continents, there are some that do to some extent. There are a number of migratory species, like the Snowy, Long and Short Eared, Flammulated, and Saw Whet that will go from Northernmost Canada to parts of the US or Mexico or other parts of the Arctic down to Russia. The Eurasian Scops is the only owl I can think of that has a regular intercontinental migration. It flies from mostly southern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa.
For less regular, but long excursions, Barn Owls and Short Ears are some of the most long distance flyers. Barn Owls have started making their way from Australia to New Zealand vis hopping on ships or planes. Short Ears have been found to travel between Scotland or Iceland to England, Norway, or Africa. GPS tracking is helping biologists learn much more about migration and irruption patterns than we have ever been able to do, and genetic testing is teaching us the history of owl migration and expansion through the millennia.
We can go more into any of this that you’d like. I wanted to give you a comprehensive answer, but we could also spend a very loooong time talking about a number of these things so I don’t want to overwhelm you! Just let me know if you want to hear more about anything!
Wow, I’ll be jiggered!
I mean, I understand that theropods as a group have been around that long, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that various descendent bird groups have been. So Galliformes yes, but not so much others.
Indeed, browsing a bit just now:
Hummy-hum-hum!
Reading how I wrote that now, it looks a little confusing. The owls are not as old as the last dinosaurs, but they started becoming their own thing shortly after the end of the dinosaurs themselves.
This article talks about the most complete owl fossil that I could find anything about, aging back about 55-60 millions years.
Scientists describe the most complete fossil from the early stages of owl evolution
To be fair, it sounds like a proto-owl, so likely not exactly like a modern owl maybe, but there looks to be enough in common with modern owls there doesn’t seem to be much question about the lineage.
This one sounds on the smaller side, but there were some cool likely flightless owls in the past like the Stilt Owls or the Giant Cuban Owl that would have been about waist height to a modern adult. Scary!
That all seems perfectly comprehensible to me. As Kriss from Romania once observed (dang, what ever happened to her YT channel?), all species are in fact transitionary forms.
A somewhat related evolutionary example I once made up is: a bear is chasing an antelope across a shoreline. They hear a commotion in the water, and both stop and take a look. What they see is an orca chasing a seal, who in turn stop and gaze at the duo on shore. In my mind all four animals chuckle, then resume the chase.
The amusement value comes from the fact that orcas are descended from hooved animals that returned to the water long ago, just as seals are descended from proto-bears that returned to the water long ago.
Anyway, thanks for sharing about the owl or proto-owl with the raptorial tendencies. One of these days I have at least one more post to contribute to SO, about a modern ‘owl’ that lost the ability to fly. A little riddle, as it were.
Haha, nice.
I like your double animal chase story.
I’m a fan of hippos also, and I know their closest relatives are the cetaceans. They just couldn’t make up their minds if they wanted to be land or water animals! 😁
Our changing climate and biosphere will surely come up with some new amazing creatures in the future.
I look forward to anything you have to share. It sounds exciting from the teaser!
I could be wrong, but I believe that hippos are part of the horse clade, and it was actually older hooved ancestors of horses that evolved in to the cetaceans.
It’s worth a fact-check, perhaps.
It’s going to be rough for a while in the wake of humans causing most species to go extinct, but yeah… eventually new life will form. The planet still has ~500-600 million years for viable complex life to form until the main type of photosynthesis gets shut down by the sun getting hotter.
I don’t typically follow much on evolutionary biology, not that it doesn’t interest me, but that we seem to be learning so much it feels overwhelming but that we can do generic testing so readily.
I looked on Wikipedia quickly, and hippos are order Artiodactyl, the even toed ungulates. It says that a lot of people are trying to separate them from cetaceans, but then it also says this from a late 90s study:
I never researched the hippo to anywhere near what I do with the owls. I just started to feel they weren’t given their due and are treated like aquatic pandas, all cute and pudgy, when they are totally tough and brutal and deadly, and now I think they are the true king of beasts!
Oh wow, I was way off. TIL!
So yes indeedy, hippos are evidently the closest living relative to cetaceans, sharing a common ancestor that branched off a looong time ago:
Somehow I’d gotten it in to my head that hippos were a long-separated descendent of horses, I suppose because of their name, which literally means “water-horse” in old Greek. But horses are odd-toed ungulates, so it’s not even the same order of hooved animals. Whoops. :S
There’s a good argument for that. I believe their reputation in Africa is of a dangerous animal that one should normally take extreme care in approaching. On YT you can see some videos of hippos chasing boats when they become irritated, and they’re astonishingly fast, despite their bulk.
Compare them to a superficially similar animal such as rhinos-- when working at a zoo a long time ago, while doing some watering, I almost backed myself in to their open enclosure, and they had a chance to absolutely wreck me if they wanted. Yet they did nothing. In fact they’re generally gentle animals.
Btw, I think one key difference there is that bull hippos have harems of females, creating a territory that they must defend at times against other males that want to oust them. So they naturally need to have a hair trigger temper from what I understand.
Makes me think Owls are dinosaurs!
Wow, impressively far.
I assume this is accidental, but I enjoy thinking there is a plan here.
Do you have a references for the different areas for the different species of owls? I did some googling, and found a few maps (the barn owl has quite the range), but I imagine you might have a very comprehensive resource at your fingertips.
You are correct. Owls, like all birds, are offshoots of the therapod dinosaurs. The owls had enough with the pesky dinos and thus nuked them from orbit.
Not quite sure about the owls on planes, but the owls on ships is pretty easy to explain. Wherever people are, there’s stored food, and therefor rodents. Where there’s rodents, there be owls. Which is why we get owls even in mega cites today with no trees. The food is around, they just need to be a bit more creative with shelter.
There are about 250 species of owl around today. That’s a busy map to have them all, but your closest and easiest to navigate option overall is probably going to be Owls of the World. It’s got them all listed, so you just click one and get a map and a good amount of data. Other sources that are useful if you have a specific bird in mind are:
eBird
AllAboutBirds
Audobon
Good old Wikipedia has most info and maps also.
All sources seem to all steal data from each other and likely the original source for at least 3/4 of what you’ll find anywhere is from one of the Cornell Lab bird sites like eBird and AllAboutBirds. Cornell Labs has a tooooon of bird related info and tools.
It’s like wingspan in real life.
Owlful resources each and everyone. The range map on ebird is perfect! Thank you.
Hah, it is!
Yes, even though the data is similar, the presentation is all different between those sites, so I thought you’d find one you liked best.