Barn owls are one of those species with “global distribution,” where one could consider the barn owls of Europe to be the same species as the ones in Texas and Kinshasa and Kwangtung. Are they tho? I’m sure there are “cryptic” species hidden within that range, noteworthy subspecies, etc. They are the most visible members of their branch of owlkind, the Tytonidae. Tytonids are less likely to have feather “ears” than “true owl” strigids, and generally look like “shy guys” from mario brothers.
I’ve personally seen one in a zoo and one in the wild. I used to walk back and forth across Auburn in the middle of the night, often between two and four AM. Once – I think this was when I was living in the adjacent tiny town of Pacific – I was walking the Interurban Trail and saw a ghost white headless-looking thing float above the trail, from the trees on one side to the trees on the other. A fleeting glimpse, but enough to – in conjunction with range information – positively ID the suspect.
My dad used to know this shitty neonazi who dabbled in “vulture culture” before that term was coined. Barn owls are not infrequently hit by cars, and this dude randomly hit barn owls twice within a pretty short time on the exact same stretch of road. He preserved the bodies in some way, I don’t recall – skeletonizing or taxidermy, whatever. I never actually saw them. When this particular neonazi hadn’t fully turned but was beginning his descent, he gave my dad his Dead Kennedys tape, and that’s how I came to receive my first hardcore punk rock album, In God We Trust, Inc. (prior to this i only had dead milkmen CDs). I guess as the punk became nazi, he felt the need to fuck off.
When I was in junior high, we got to dissect owl pellets. Some may have come from barn owls; impossible for us to know. But it was super cool and interesting. I don’t normally like anything to do with excretions – piss, shit, vomit – but dry owl pellets seem rather sterile. Bleached white by stomach acid, they are little blocks of compressed fur and bone that came out the front end of the bird, so they didn’t have to waste digestive resources on the hard bits. Pick apart a little block of fur and find interesting tiny bones. The skulls of those rodents looked so cool to baby Bébé.
Anyway, being a massively successful species, they provide some hope to me for the biosphere. Whatever we do to this world, barn owls will probably pull through. Shine on, you funky ghosts. Keep eating rodents and puking up the cool parts. I’m down.
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I have seen the odd owl, including seven in a hawthorn tree some kind that like to roost in groups together over winter, they were so well camouflaged that even standing on the bare bit of the grass and looking really carefully we didn’t see them until someone who knew exactly which hawthorn they were in pointed it out. Then we spent a while going ok I’ve got the one at 1 o’clock, and one at half 2, but you’re saying there’s one at four? The eventual total was seven in that tree and another couple who preferred an ash tree. This was in daylight and they were sleeping or dozily ruffling their feathers before settling down again, completely unconcerned by the humans ogling them.
We hear them here, classic ‘to whit to whoo’, and one year this ‘keck, keck keck’ coming from three different trees in the garden, which my birder bros told me was the fledged young waiting in different trees for the parents to deliver the goods. I’ve not seen the local ones, but I do like hearing them.
nice mental image, thx
Wikipedia splits barn owls into 5 species – Tyto alba from Africa and the Western Palaeoarctic; Tyto furcata from the Americas; Tyto javanica from Australia and south east Asia; and two island endemics, one extinct. Wikipedia also has an article on Tyto glaucops, from Hispaniola, and possibly some of the Lesser Antilles – people aren’t quite sure where to draw the line if it is segregated from Tyto furcata. I guess it is omitted from the barn owl page because it’s called the ashy-faced owl, even it is nested in the barn owls. The genus article has 17 species.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyto
There are also a variety of fossil and subfossil species, including subfossil giants from Cuba and the Bahamas (riveroi/pollens) and fossil giants from the former Gargano island in Italy (robusta/gigantea).
I don’t know about cryptic, but otherwise you’d win your bet; geographic variation has been parcelled up into lots of subspecies. I wasn’t previously aware that the white colour of barn owls in Britain is not typical of the species in most of its range. Britain has paler barn owls than any part of continental Europe, with Portugual coming in next (so it’s not an Arctic trait, which was my initial suspicion; now why did Linnaeus pick alba as the epithet?).
Search terms – phylogeny/phylogeography of Tytonidae/Tyto/barn owls/Tyto alba. Phylogeny will get genetic variation between named taxa, especially species, and phylogeography genetic variation within species.
why search terms when i can go off shoddy memory?
idk if the ones here are any more or less pale than in europe, but they look white enough with the lights out. kind of odd, you’d think they’d go for a color less visible in the dark.
Swallows.
Have you seen swallows?
very much so. will have to do three or four life list articles for em. surprising because they’re fast enough to be hard to see. if you’re ever at the billy frank jr nisqually park, near the visitor center a few different species share a nesting area under the awning, so close you could steal chicks if you wanted to.
thanks for the article ideas, and have you seen them? barn swallows, at least, are easier to find than hummingbirds – if not easier to see. what’s your experience of em?
I have two swallow stories.
There was an old, unused shed that was occupied by a colony of swallows. I never went inside to take a closer look, so I don’t know what the nests looked like.
After the babbies started to fly, it was necessary that they return to their nests inside the shed.
They would take a fast flight toward the opening and chicken-out at the last second and veer off. Over and over and over.
The adults were sitting on the edge of the opening, yelling advice but that didn’t really help.
I assume that they all made it eventually but we’d made it a drinking game and eventually our interest wavered.
The reason I think this is a worthy anecdote is that the opening to the shed was about the size of a sheet of plywood.
4 foot by 8 foot.
excellent. that’s the kinda stuff i want on these posts.
The other story is sadder.
My work-site was at the base of a large sandstone cliff. There was a large colony of swallows (presumably “cliff” swallows). More than 30 nests. The nests were those ones about the size of a melon made of mud and swallow spit, with a tiny, bird-diameter entrance. That summer the mud they were using came from a near-by road construction.
The following summer there 6 nests. We were informed that the birds probably died of all that ingestion of petroleum distillate.
sad indeed! that shit fucking sucks. rip u funky birds.
It just occurred to me:
flying from dark homenest to bright sunshine would be easy compared to
flying from bright sunshine to utter darkness which probably contains homenest.
If swallows made horror movies …
it’s interesting to consider the perspective of creatures that are not quite like us. easy to take for granted sometimes.
although …
why did the babbies (adolescents) not fly to the window ledge, land (right beside their parents), wait until their eyes adjusted, fly home?
(Why am I still on about this?)
(t’was more than 30 years ago)
animals are so specific and weird in how they approach shit. my cat won’t sit on my lap but will rest against my shins – but only when i’m sitting up and cross-legged, and only with his back to me, and only after he’s yelled in my face a few times and paced in circles.