Love the orange eyes. The article is interesting too. Some highlights:

• Each owl eats about 40 pounds of mice per year.
• They like to take a shower when it rains. You can see that here.
• The babies have different voices, higher or lower, so you can tell them apart. Example here (click on “juvenile calls”)
• When they find an empty nest and there’s a fight about who owns it, the winner is usually whoever lays the first egg.
• But sometimes two different kinds of birds lay eggs in the same nest. There’s been at least one time where a couple of sparrowhawks successfully raised a long-eared owl chick.
• They enjoy the company of other long-eared owls. In the winter, owls from an entire region sometimes sleep in the same tree.

It does look awfully delicate for all that it does. Hollow bones, tiny muscles. A lot of performance. And how much control do they have over individual wing feathers? (Not asking for an answer, just thinking out loud.) It’s fascinating.

I love the first picture because it looks like the owl has flaps and spoilers. I didn’t realize their feathers can ruffle up like that.

Different ways, depending on how I feel.

• Music. Metal, mostly. Something I can turn up and get into.
• Sing along or scream. Ideally in the car on the freeway, so I don’t have to worry about scaring the neighbors.
• Something active or active-ish. Cooking something complicated. Practicing the piano/keyboard. Bike ride. Gym, so you can punch stuff. Or a long walk with something to listen to.
• Vent to a friend.
• Write it out and delete it.
• Stew in it for longer than I should.

Never realized that shades of brown, gray, and black can be so pretty. That two-toned beak looks like it could do some damage. I like the juxtaposition of majestic and slightly goofy, too

Interesting! Thanks for the info, and the pics.

I’ve never seen that many owls together, at least not ones that look full grown. I wonder if hunting in the winter is easier as a group.

Looks like Royal Street. I think that’s Craig Tracy’s gallery on the right (next to the parked car with the brake lights). He does some pretty neat stuff with body painting. Look for the human in every photo.

Adding to that: I’d like to see the top dogs at insurance companies go through the same thing they put us through. No MRI or CT scan for you. You get ibuprofen and PT because nothing else is necessary. Maybe in a few years you’ll get surgery, when the problem is almost hopelessly bad. You get to shell out 5 or 6 figures for it, and no, you don’t get to use your millions. You have as much money as someone who absolutely can’t afford it. Oh, and that time off work? Unpaid.

And make them pay for the consequences of their actions. How many people like Wilfredo Engalla have there been and will there be? He had lung cancer, but it was misdiagnosed as colds and allergies for 5 years. When he found that out, he sued Kaiser. They forced him into arbitration and dragged out the case so nothing happened until he died, because they thought they would only have to pay half as much that way. In the end, his family got $150,000 (minus tens of thousands in costs to get that far).

Do that to enough people for enough years, and eventually you find out people have a breaking point. Who would have thought.

Interesting article, thanks for the link. I missed owl of the year last year, and the first couple posts this year. It sounds like an awful lot of work, but I love the idea.

I’d like to see an owl eating a porcupine. If it’s anything like a camel eating cactus, it’s gotta be pretty interesting. Maybe they have a way to pull out the spines.

Interesting pictures, and a very striking owl. How do you decide who gets in the bracket?

I’m curious to see how far the saw whet will get. They’re so cute with their giant heads and big eyes. Eagle owls are neat too. Maybe not as classically cute, but majestic.

I had to look up barking owls just now. They really do sound kind of like a dog barking. Interesting that they eat bats. I didn’t know there were birds that did that.

Live music does it for me. It’s best when I’m close enough to make eye contact with the musicians, and when the audience is into it too. It’s a total rush. If I had to pick between music and sex, it’d be music, hands down.

I can relate to the comment about swimming too. I imagine hiking, kayaking, or anything else physical that you really like could give you a similar feeling.

Beautiful. That’s an impressive wingspan.

That’s a lot of tiny bones in what looks like a pretty short neck (at least from the outside). Also interesting how the blood flow works. You mentioned a little bit about that before, so I got curious and found this:

Also, it has recently been discovered that in the owl neck, one of the major arteries feeding the brain passes through bony holes in the vertebrae. These hollow cavities are approximately 10 times larger in diameter than the vertebral artery travelling through it. The extra space … creates a set of cushioning air pockets that allow the artery to move around when twisted.

Blood vessels at the base of the head, just under the jaw bone, can also act as contractile blood reservoirs, allowing owls to pool blood to meet the energy needs of their large brains and eyes, while they rotate their heads.

I would read that. It’s interesting to learn how other cultures see things. And I think learning about the not-so-pretty side of things isn’t anything to shy away from, personally. As long as it’s done tactfully, it’s a good way to get more context and learn how to interact with the world around us.

Like illegal timber cutting. It can be hard to appreciate how harmful that can be until you see it, and compare it to how a healthy forest looks. Or vultures, you have to learn about how they were hunted to extinction to really appreciate how neat it is to have them back. Or how wolves help keep Yellowstone healthy.

Plus there’s plenty of cute stuff around here to balance out the negatives.

Revenue pressure was even brought down to the level of nurses – some of whom say they have been pushed to charge for the smallest of items from Kleenexes to batteries. One 2022 email, obtained by the Guardian, shows a supervisor at Parkview DeKalb telling nurses that she had reviewed their charts for the week and found they had “missed” $50,000 in charges as a team. The following year, managers told staff to be more stringent about how many linen towels they handed out to patients – an initiative they termed “linen stewardship”.

…

This fiscal year it found roughly $140m to pour into capital projects across greater Fort Wayne – investments that, a Moody’s report from July noted, will help further its goal of regional expansion.

Also mentioned in the article…some hospitals have their own private police forces.

Aww. Looks like her fur is standing on end. But she’s pretty brave, getting so close to the Ungeheuer (monster). Nice to see her exploring her new home.

I love that view, especially at night. Crazy how different (and barren) it used to look.

I started learning a little about music theory. I’ve been interested for a while, but always thought I wouldn’t be able to understand it. But it’s doable, a little at a time.

And I’ve been going outside more. I spend too much time in front of the computer. It’s nice to have fresh air and read, listen to music, or just take in the surroundings.