alt.hn

5/28/2026 at 10:21:59 PM

The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers

 https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-genius-of-the-barn-owls-feathers/

by EA-3167

6/1/2026 at 12:20:14 PM

What isn't mentioned is that owl feathers are generally less oily than many other birds. This makes them softer and thus quieter, but the penalty is that that they get water-logged faster. As a result, owls find it harder to hunt in wet weather, and extended rainy periods can cause real problems, especially in the breeding season, when youngsters need continual feeding.

(source: I used to volunteer at a Raptor conservancy).

by KineticLensman

6/1/2026 at 2:00:26 PM

Adding to this, I highly recommend looking up images of wet owls. They look hilarious.

by taeric

6/1/2026 at 3:48:55 PM

Yes. Especially for owls like the Great Grey, it shows how small the bird is inside all of those feathers.

by KineticLensman

6/1/2026 at 6:40:36 AM

Reminded if this video immediately https://youtu.be/-WigEGNnuTE they got almost nothing on the mics.

by smusamashah

6/1/2026 at 10:25:45 AM

Look at how pure the signal is from the peregrine's wings. The signal from feral pigeon is extremely noisy in comparison, as if it is fighting to stay the in the air. The peregrine wingbeat is clean so I presume the energy is being turned into velocity with high efficiency. Extremely cool.

by smackay

6/1/2026 at 1:17:56 PM

I also love the longer clip with the bed of feathers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_FEaFgJyfA

It gives a good visual as to how much air is being moved/disturbed during the flight/glide of each.

by Amorymeltzer

6/1/2026 at 7:27:06 AM

> Over the next few days, the owl makes 16 more strikes at mice, missing only four times, each time by less than two inches.

How did the experimenter measure miss distance in pitch darkness? IR illumination is presumably out in case the owl was able to see it, and I didn't think thermal imaging was a thing yet in the late '50s.

by mrec

6/1/2026 at 10:25:34 AM

Scratch markings on wax flooring beneath the leaf cover or the grid location on the floor was instrumented to report to telemetry when carrying weight of the owl. Assuming the mouse had its ankle rope tied to a pin nailed into the floor.

by __patchbit__

6/1/2026 at 10:41:40 AM

He did use a IR stroboscope and a camera, as owls can apparently not see IR.

by shellfishgene

6/1/2026 at 11:58:06 AM

But in that case this bit of TFA feels a bit out of place:

> To eliminate the possibility that the owl was [...] detecting heat from the body of the mouse (for instance, by sensing infrared light emitted by a warm body), the experiment is repeated with a mouse-sized wad of paper dragged through the leaves

by mrec

6/1/2026 at 7:47:16 AM

Completely random guess, but perhaps ultrasonically? Ultrasonic rangefinders are relatively cheap and accurate these days, so maybe they were too in the '50s?

by gucci-on-fleek

6/1/2026 at 10:47:26 AM

It doesn't seem like owls have infrared vision, in that case an IR camera looks like the easiest way to go.

by blaze33

6/1/2026 at 2:15:11 PM

They mention that the ears have gone non-bilateral to achieve better 3d sound localization.

It brings to mind the question of why nothing seems to have evolved two pairs of ears with separate openings; We're all working with varying degrees of spectrum shaping to achieve up-down sound localization. If you wanted to design a robot that can perform sound localization, the obvious answer for that extra dimension would be to just double up on the microphones.

by mapt

6/1/2026 at 2:36:30 PM

Helpful reframing on this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/answers/comments/mo5sqi/do_any_anim...

What do ears do? Transduce pressure vibrations into intelligible signals. If this is our understanding of an 'ear', we never really need more than two but instead need either binaural or non-binaural/decoupled. Beyond that, what does having more openings grant us that we're not getting with all the other pressure-sensitive organs we have? (namely all of our skin, some specialized tissues in other animals)

by bonsai_spool

6/1/2026 at 3:13:05 PM

[flagged]

by hirra

6/1/2026 at 5:14:57 PM

My 9 yo corrected me the other day. “That’s not a barn owl, it’s a barrad owl.” I had to google it. Apparently they’re both a thing.

by ParkRanger

6/1/2026 at 10:45:48 AM

Looking at the Russo/Ukrainian war, I wonder if/when someone introduces "owl drones".

Current drones are not very loud (well, Shaheds are), but if someone could make them more silent, they would be even harder to detect. Maybe covering them with a structure similar to owl featchers would do it.

by inglor_cz

6/1/2026 at 1:34:34 PM

Zipline has a patent on their quieter drone rotors, based off barn owls, according to Mark Rober.

by fragmede

6/1/2026 at 9:33:34 AM

MIT should know better that Natural Selection ≠ Genius

by nelox

6/1/2026 at 10:44:20 AM

It is a figure of speech. That article is not a scientific article, it is a human-readable popularizing text for non-professionals.

by inglor_cz

6/1/2026 at 2:10:30 PM

And yet we see a christian posting about "what his father made" in this thread, on hacker news. Figures of speech do matter.

by hilariously

6/1/2026 at 2:05:03 PM

As a Christian I am always delighted to learn the brilliant things my Father made <3

by cbdevidal