Jadon Andrew Robles
I kind of feel stupid writing about owls as in my opinion they are one of the few creatures that make you feel like they know more about you than you know about them. If you have ever seen an owl in the wild, you will agree with me that they give off a sense of power, control and wisdom in ways that even the most respected author, philosopher or politician couldn’t. But here I am ready to write about my understanding of them after admitting that I probably have an embarrassingly limited amount of knowledge.
The first time I saw an owl was in a small park in the middle of a city. In all my years of bird watching this was not the place I expected to see my first owl. The park was by no means large, with so few trees that you could probably count them on your fingers. It intrigued me so much at the time that I had driven over an hour to this park in the suburbs of Istanbul just to find this owl that I had heard was nesting here. Not surprisingly, despite the fact that there were no more than ten trees that the owl could be in, it took me over half an hour to find the animal. But when I did find it, what I saw was breathtaking. A ball of feathers not moving a muscle, looking at me with the look that your dentist gives you after noticing that once again you forgot to floss. Not only did it feel like the owl was looking down upon me, both literally and figuratively, but it also felt like it was looking at me with a sense of disappointment, as if it wished that it could look upon something actually worth looking at. I definitely felt like the inferior being in the interaction. In reality, though, owls are the birds that resemble us the most. Similar to other birds of prey, owls have very amazing vision, but what sets them apart is the placement of their eyes. Like horses, most birds’ eyes are on either side of their head, which gives them the ability to see most of the way around their head but really hurts their depth perception. For owls, their eyes are like those of humans, placed on their face and facing forwards; this gives owls amazing depth perception, and their ability to turn their head 360 degrees prevents them from missing out on their field of view. Also proportionally owls’ heads are way bigger than other birds, also similar to humans’. I find it comical that the creatures we say are the smartest and wisest in the animal kingdom are the creatures that are most similar to us, like owls and monkeys. Humans clearly think quite highly of themselves.
In all that I just wrote, I assumed that the owl even noticed that I was there and if it did notice that it cared; this may well be a false assumption. It is very possible that in reality the owl couldn’t have cared less about my being there and the fact that I assumed he looked at me with any feeling at all shows all the more how as humans we assign value to ourselves that was never there in the first place.