Interesting. I think you mentioned it before, but I didn’t remember the bottom eyelids could move. I wonder if that gives them an advantage somehow. Not asking you to go digging, just thinking out loud:)
It seems like they can really change the shape of their face a lot. Anywhere from a dish to a pretty pointy V, like 1:30 in the video. My totally uneducated guess is that the smushy sleepy face would channel some sound away from their ears. It can be hard to sleep when your ears are set to full power.
I was just looking to see if the lower eyelid was thicker, so as to act like blackout curtains. I found a paper on the Little Owl and it said the lower eyelid is thinner, but it did mention it was also more pigmented, so it may still block more light than the upper lid.
The little owl (Athene noctua) has movable eyelids (upper eyelid, palpebral dorsalis and lower eyelid, palpebral ventralis). The upper eyelid is shorter, thicker and high movable more than the lower one (Figs.6& 8). The palpebral margin “plica marginalis” of each eyelid is deeply pigmented and segmented into number of folds.
Owl muscle control is absolutely nuts. Moving plumicorns, ear feathers, the facial disc, even irises independently of each other… My mind can’t even imagine!
Interesting. I think you mentioned it before, but I didn’t remember the bottom eyelids could move. I wonder if that gives them an advantage somehow. Not asking you to go digging, just thinking out loud:)
It seems like they can really change the shape of their face a lot. Anywhere from a dish to a pretty pointy V, like 1:30 in the video. My totally uneducated guess is that the smushy sleepy face would channel some sound away from their ears. It can be hard to sleep when your ears are set to full power.
I was just looking to see if the lower eyelid was thicker, so as to act like blackout curtains. I found a paper on the Little Owl and it said the lower eyelid is thinner, but it did mention it was also more pigmented, so it may still block more light than the upper lid.
Owl muscle control is absolutely nuts. Moving plumicorns, ear feathers, the facial disc, even irises independently of each other… My mind can’t even imagine!
Huh, fascinating! It’d be interesting to experience the world the way they do, or really a lot of other critters.
Very much so! To try out super vision, super hearing, or seeing light in a different spectrum would be so cool!