A great gray owl

GREG SCHNEIDER/BIRDPHOTOGRAPHER. CA/GETTY IMAGES

Super Hearing

Owls use their amazing listening skills to hunt at night.

A mouse quietly scurries along the forest floor in the middle of the night. Suddenly an owl swoops down from the sky and grabs the tiny animal with its powerful claws. How was the owl able to find the mouse in the pitch-dark?

Owls have many adaptations that help them hunt (see Deadly Hunters). They have big eyes that help them see in the dark. Their wings also flap silently so they don’t startle prey. But what helps them the most is their incredible hearing.

Good Listeners

MALCOLM SCHUYL/FLPA/MINDEN PICTURES

FACE LIKE A RADAR DISH: An owl’s face is shaped like a dish. This helps it collect and amplify sound waves.

A great gray owl’s hearing is so sensitive that it can hear a mouse hidden underneath a layer of snow or leaves. That’s because the bird has an amazing ability to detect sound waves.

Sound waves are vibrations that carry sound through air. To understand sound and sound waves, imagine clapping your hands. The air next to your hands moves outward very quickly. When these sound waves hit your ear, they vibrate against your eardrum. This makes tiny hairs inside your inner ear move. A signal is then sent to your brain to decode the vibrations as sound.

Animals with big ears tend to have better hearing. That’s because bigger ears catch a lot of sound waves. But owls don’t have big ears! The tufts of feathers you may see at the top of some owls’ heads look like ears, but they’re really just feathers.

Instead, owls rely on the shape of their face, says Kevin McGowan. He’s a scientist who studies birds at Cornell University in New York. Most owls have faces that are shaped like a dish that collect and amplify sound waves, explains McGowan. Also, the feathers on their face are shaped to direct sound into their ear openings.

Finding the Source

Not only can owls detect faint sounds, but they are excellent at pinpointing where a noise comes from. That’s because most owls have ears that are asymmetrical. This means that one ear is higher up on their head than the other. When a sound travels to an owl’s ears, it hits the closest ear first.

An owl’s brain uses this tiny difference in timing to figure out where a sound is coming from. The area of the brain that processes hearing is much more powerful than in other birds, explains McGowan. With this super sense, it’s no wonder that owls can hunt so well in the dark. “Owls own the night,” he says.      

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