Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you are having a really good day,
There is a bird in the Forrest they call The Great Horned Owl. Actually it doesn't have horns at all -- just little tufts of feathers that are pointed and look like horns. And most people think these are their ears, but we rabbits know they aren't that either. The Owl's ears are very unique, and are located lower down on their heads than those tufts of feathers. And here is where it gets really interesting. You see, the Owl has one ear on the side of its head about eye level. You can't really see it, as it's covered by feathers. The other ear is down about as low as its beak.
Now you might wonder why God made the Owls' ears like that. Well, I'll tell you. When sound reaches the Owl, one ear hears it a fraction of a second before the other ear. This helps the Owl pinpoint the source of the sound very accurately , and means that when he takes off from the tree limb at a very high speed, he knows exactly where he is headed.
And added to that are two amazing things about the Owls eyes. All bird's eyes have these little things called "rod cells". This is the part of the eye that captures light, and the more of these that a bird has, the better the bird can see in the dark. The Owl has many more of these rod cells than other birds, so many more that the Owl can almost see in the pitch black dark. You humans don't even have those. If you want to see in the dark, you have to put on "night goggles" --- just like the characters in some of the video games you play use. If there is the slightest bit of light in the Forrest, even from the stars, the Owl sees just about like it was daytime.
The second thing the Owl's eyes have are "overlaps". That means that each eye brings in what it sees in a slightly different place. It is like when your parents take you to a 3D movie, and they give you those glasses to watch the movie. The picture on the screen is "Overlapped", and if you don't have on the 3D glasses, the picture looks blurred. The glasses make the picture look just like it is supposed to look, and it has a depth that a regular movie doesn't have. The "overlap" in the Owl's eyes helps it determine depth much better, and just how far away an object is, so when the Owl flies it knows the spot it is going to; as well as how far away it is.
Well, with all that going for it, the Owl is a bird we rabbits want to avoid, so we won't be dinner for some greedy Owl, who ought to be eating seeds like other self respecting birds. So we figured something out about the Owl. That is that the Owl nests very early in the Spring -- way before other birds. And it lays its eggs right away. After that, the Owl won't leave the nest for three or four months while it waits for the eggs to hatch. This is because the Owl knows it can get very cold in the Spring, and if it leaves the nest to hunt, its eggs can easily freeze, killing the little Owls inside. When the eggs have hatched, we rabbits know to stay away from the Owl's nest. After three months of no food, and with three hungry little Owls to feed, it has to get busy hunting. In addition, Because it laid its eggs so early, the leaves haven't come out on the trees yet, making its job of finding some little mice a lot easier.
The problem with all of this is that those little fellows will grow from about three inches when the hatch to over two feet in just three months. Then we rabbits have three more Owls in the Forrest to worry about ---Ugg!!!!
Keep your chin up.
Robert P. Rabbit