On the one hand, owls are a standard image of knowledge – and with their huge staring eyes, they certainly look clever and considerate. Then again, I’ve heard some hen guides describe owls as “actually fairly dumb” – which damage me a bit, provided that I quite like them. So, what’s the fact?
It seems owls are certainly nothing particular with regard to their mind dimension or mental capability, significantly in comparison with species recognized for his or her intelligence, corresponding to crows and parrots. Their mind dimension is greater than that of hawks and falcons (supply). However that doesn’t essentially point out knowledge. Giant elements of owl brains are coping with visible acuity quite than with reasoning, quite like Lightroom hogging extra assets on my laptop computer than Excel (okay, flawed comparability).
Then once more, as certainly one of my ex-bosses said each time we thought-about placing out a considerably flawed product available in the market, “Is it adequate?” And at the least for owls, the reply is sure – the intelligence they’ve is sufficient to effectively hunt their prey even at evening and to outlive. Owls are largely solitary, so lots of the social actions that apparently require intelligence (though social media doesn’t precisely show this level) are usually not related to them, lowering the necessity for intelligence.
Nonetheless, the query stays why owls had been ever thought-about to be sensible within the first place. In classical Greece, owls (particularly, the Little Owl) had been the image of Athena, the goddess of knowledge. In flip, most definitely it is because the owl’s potential to maneuver in the dead of night with out bumping into issues was equated with knowledge.
In medieval occasions, owls took on a extra sinister that means and a sign of prevailing antisemitism: “Owls, who’re day-blind and stay in darkness, had been used to characterize Jews in medieval England, who had been stated to have rejected the sunshine of Christ and stay within the uncleanliness of non secular blasphemy” (supply). One other widespread affiliation was with witchcraft.
Within the fashionable Western world, owls received again their (unjustified) affiliation with knowledge. Examples embody Hedwig in Harry Potter, owls as sensible creatures in lots of kids’s books, the logos of educational establishments and libraries that includes owls, and even the Tripadvisor emblem (no, they didn’t pay me for together with this, sadly).
I want to add another fascinating discovering, though it’s only very loosely linked to the subject of this put up. Researchers in contrast the mind dimension of birds captured by pygmy owls – and inside the identical species, birds with smaller brains had been caught earlier within the season and at increased frequency than these with bigger brains.
Cowl Photograph: Little Owl in Dulan, Qinghai, China