The Last Word On Nothing

Owls. Little downy Ewoks. Fat and fusiform with big round eyes, legs feathered like miniature pilot pants in a stiff wind, perhaps a pair of droopy tuft ears. What is more trustworthy than droopy tuft ears? They appear as if they will take your deepest secrets to the grave. Perhaps this is why owls decorate a wide variety of hipster girl paraphernalia.

But beware, because owl tufts are not really ears. And this is where the treachery begins. Instead, owl ears are clandestine, twisted caverns, buried out of sight on either side of the bird’s sinisterly rounded skull. Worse, one is high, and one, low – an asymmetry that allows owls to triangulate on the exact location of sounds. Sounds made by things they will snab with their razor sharp talons and eviscerate with weird, hooked little nose-job beaks. Things like…YOU.

That’s right. Owls are full of malice and they want you dead. In the Southeastern United States, they neck-slap cops and commandeer police cruisers. In Oregon, barred owls regularly mug joggers and ruthlessly persecute the northern spotted owl, an only slightly less nefarious breed that is in danger of extinction (the world may be safer for it). Now, the federal government is killing barred owls to save spotted owls, and the barred owls are retaliating, bombing government workers at the Oregon State Capital. It is a war. Fedoras have been stolen. One man even came away with a “really violent haircut.”

And none of the victims heard it coming. Not only because they had inferior symmetrical ears. But because owl feathers have special hooks and bows that dissipate air turbulence, turning the raptors into silent death machines by muting any sounds made by their wings. Great horned owl talons require 28 pounds of force to pry open; they use this grip to sever spinal cords as if with a pair of tetanus-covered rusty hedge loppers. The Rachel Maddow Show got it right with this warning sign, though their viewers had some good ideas, too:

Sure, ninnies over at Audubon, blinded as they are by an unnatural affection for these modern day carnivorous flying dinosaurs, will explain the attacks away as “perfectly normal just-protecting-nest behavior.” But did you know that some owls eat salamanders? Salamanders!! And did you know they swallow creatures whole and eject their bones, just like those weird bat things in the 1982 cult film Beastmaster, only instead of ejecting them in a booger-slimed pile, they barf them out encased in a desiccated wad of hair? How would you like to be a desiccated wad?

No one is safe from the white streak of terror that is a swooping owl. Not garden hoses. Not fearless rabbits. Not even eagles. And if you’ve forgotten just how badass eagles can be, check out this montage of eagle attacks on grizzlies, kangaroos and yes, the deeply malevolent sloth. There is a reason why nearly every single owl video on YouTube is scored with tense, horror-movie music, including this one of a great horned owl lording over the undead body of a vulture.

If you’re unlucky enough to spot an owl, you could try to resist. But as these songbirds learned, owls are resolute and immovable in their determination to destroy. More likely is that the same thing will happen to you as happened to this unwary filmmaker in California. No one can know whether she lived to post the footage herself, or a passerby found her camera next to her ravaged corpse.

But maybe, deep down, all this senseless violence disguises a deeper truth: Owls are just clumsily grappling for love.

Retired spotted owl biologist Eric Forsman once bravely put aside his fear of dismemberment to care for injured owls that couldn’t be returned to the wild, keeping them in giant wire cages behind his house in Corvallis, Oregon. Among his charges was a male great horned owl that Forsman allowed to roam unsupervised around the neighborhood. “You’d be walking home from work and he would fly in and land on your head and try to copulate,” Forsman told me casually when I interviewed him last fall for another story. “They kind of hold their feet like this and tread” – he extends his hands as if grabbing for set of radio knobs – “going, ‘Hoo hoo hoo.’ ”

“The problem,” Forsman added, “was that he would do it to random people and scare the shit out of them.”

First image of the cutest of the owls, the saw-whet, courtesy of the author. Second image courtesy of The Rachel Maddow Show.