Celebrating Owl Awareness Day

August 4 is Owl Awareness Day

August 4 is International Owl Awareness Day – a day to celebrate these much-loved raptors and highlight the threats they face.

Did you know:

Australia is home to 11 resident owl species

From the small-statured Southern Boobook to the mighty Powerful Owl, Australia’s 11 resident owl species are split across the barn owl and hawk-owl families. While Tawny Frogmouths are also nocturnal and commonly mistaken for owls, they’re more closely related to  nightjars.

Owls occur on every continent except Antarctica. In Australia, you can find owls in every state and territory: from the alps to the desert and in woodlands, grasslands and rainforests.

Owls are formidable (and unique) predators

Owls are carnivorous and prey on mammals, birds, reptiles and insects. The parts they don’t digest, they later regurgitate as pellets.

As efficient nocturnal predators, owls are unique in their physiology and anatomy – and are well-adapted to hunting for prey at night with their superior eyesight and hearing.

You might be surprised to discover that owls don’t have eyeballs: they’re more like elongated tubes. Their huge eyes are fixed in place by a special bony structure in the skull called sclerotic rings, which means owls can’t move or roll their eyes within their sockets. To compensate, owls have evolved the remarkable ability to turn their head as much as 270 degrees in either direction without moving their body.

With their unusual forward-facing eyes, owls also have 3D or “binocular” vision.  Like humans and other predatory animals, owls can see an object with both eyes at the same time – while their acute depth perception means owls can accurately judge distance to perfectly time their attacks. Unlike most birds, their retina has many more rods than cones – so while owls have excellent night-time vision, they can’t see colour very well.

And their ears are pretty strange, too.

Called the facial disc, the ring of feathers around an owl’s face helps capture and funnel sound into their ears like a satellite dish. The ears of some owl species like Barn Owls are asymmetrical and set at different places on the skull, which helps them pinpoint the location of their prey. Remarkably, an owl can determine the direction of a sound by turning its head until the sound waves reach both ears at the same time.

Owls fly on silent wings

Thanks to the unique structure and form of their wing feathers, many owls have the ability to move almost silently through the air. Their wings are large in relation to their body mass, which means owls can fly unusually slowly and with little flapping. Owls are the masters of stealth thanks to their special, noise-cancelling feathers: comb-like serrations on their wing feathers streamline the airflow, while the velvety texture of their flight feathers muffles the sound of air rushing over the wing surface

Owls are under threat

Many owl species rely on tree hollows to nest and raise their chicks in. However, these hollows can take hundreds of years to form – and widespread logging and land-clearing means critical nesting trees are becoming a rarity.

But owls face a silent killer, too.

Second-generation rodenticides, or SGARs, are powerful, slow-acting poisons that can kill not only the rats and mice they’re targeting, but any animal that eats poisoned rodents.

These powerful poisons can kill in a single dose, but they are slow-acting and can remain in tissue for months or even years. This means that rodents can consume a more-than-lethal amount of this poison and still be wandering around – like ticking timebombs. 

Poisoning from SGARs is a serious threat to birds of prey like owls, as well as household pets and other native wildlife. Yet Australia has little regulation on the use of SGARs, and these lethal rodenticides are widely available for commercial and domestic use.

Owl-friendly rodent control

Help keep owls safe this Owl Awareness Day and beyond by avoiding SGARs practising bird-friendly rodent control at home.

Join our campaign to get these bird-killing rodent poisons out of the food chain, and sign our petition calling on the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) to better regulate their domestic sale.