Hoo Hoo Knew About These Amazing Owls? Quiz

Answer: Neck

It's a myth that owls can rotate their heads in a full 360 degree circle. Amazingly, however, they can actually turn their necks 270 degrees at a time! Nature has equipped owls with 14 vertebrae instead of the normal 7. This definitely helps with motion range but what about the effect this kind of movement would have on blood flow? Well, owls also have a special system that collects blood to control the brain when the neck movement may cut off circulation.

Answer: Screech owl

Quite a number of owl species do not make the 'hoot' sound commonly associated with the animal. A pygmy owl, for instance, makes a dull, low sound. The screech owl does not make the call its name implies. Instead, it emits a series of four bouncing toots or trills.

A barn owl has a raspy, long scream. Eagle owls make a deep, booming sound heard far away. So when you're quietly listening one night trying to hear an owl, keep your ears open for a range of more than 'hoo hoo'!

Answer: Cacti

The Sonoran desert is found in the southwestern area of the United States and the northwestern part of Mexico. It has forests of saguaro cacti. Several owls have decided to call this home. The elf owl finds abandoned woodpecker holes in the plants and beds down there during its time in the desert.

The cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, one of the smaller species, also nests in the cacti which provide a great cover as it hunts lizards and insects below. Lastly, the great horned owl will often choose the top of the tall saguaro to claim its nest during the January to February time frame.

Answer: Tubular

Owls' eyes are tube shaped, immobile, and held in the skull with bony rings. They face forward and give the bird a wide range of binocular vision, which means it can focus on an object with both eyes at the same time. The eyes of this bird also work excellently at night and have a large cornea and pupil to allow as much light as possible to pass through.

These mechanisms help the owls see well at night but prevent them from seeing in multiple shades of color. Finally, these amazing orbs are covered with three eyelids to protect and clean the owl's valuable seeing assets.

Answer: Pellet

An owl's stomach has two parts: a glandular stomach and a gizzard. The gizzard area holds back things like bones, teeth, and fur while the rest of the food is passed on to the intestines. After eating, the parts in the gizzard are compressed into a pellet and go back into the front part of the stomach.

It can sit there for up to ten hours before being regurgitated. Once it's out, the owl's stomach area is clear again and it is ready to go hunting and start the cycle anew.

Answer: True

An owl's foot has two toes pointing forward and two toes pointing backwards with strong talons to grab their prey. They tend to swallow the smaller food whole and will rip larger meat into small pieces with their beaks. Farmers have kept barn owls in their areas to allow them to hunt the rodents that might damage the crops.

However, owls are also known as pseudo cannibals because they have been known to eat owls of other species. In fact, the main predator of the barred owl is the great horned owl!

Answer: Quietest Birds of Prey

Owls are silent predators that can swoop out of the air and catch unsuspecting prey below. This is because they have three unique features of their wings. The first is a downy covering across the wing. Then they have a comb of flexible, evenly spaced bristles on the front and an elastic-like fringe on the rear of each wing.

The sound of flight of a bird is usually from turbulence when air passes over the wings. The down, comb, and bristles help smooth out and scatter this sound. It makes the owl truly a silent killer.

Answer: Exceptional hearing

Owls have an amazing sense of hearing and it is due to a couple of features. Their ears are actually asymmetrical and each is a different size and at a different height on the bird's head. This increases their ability to hear a range of sounds from a variety of places.

The tufts of feathers that appear as ears are there to show mood and aggression. The flat features of the owl's face funnels sounds to the ears and can actually magnify the sound over eight times! Owls can hear sounds not detectable by many animals, including humans.

Answer: False

Owls, in fact, do not build their own nests. Some species use existing nests left over from other birds and add a few finishing touches to it. Some scrape a rough area into the ground while others use a tree or cactus cavity. Owls lay round white eggs and most species lay around 2-7 eggs.

These eggs incubate about a month. After hatching, the young owls will climb around from tree branch to tree branch, if available, before learning to fly. Most leave the nest less than 60 days later and go to find their own area.

Answer: Parliament

Most owls are active at dusk, dawn, and nighttime while they roost quietly during the day. They are usually solitary except when they are with their young or in mating pairs. However, outside of breeding season, they do gather together. A group of owls is called a parliament.

The original name came as they were considered to be a wise group, which dates back to the Greeks having an owl as the symbol for Athena, who was the goddess of wisdom. By the 1950s, CS Lewis wrote his book "The Chronicles of Narnia" and called a group of owls a parliament based on Chaucer's poem "The Parliament of Fowls".

The name caught on quickly.