From Southwest VA Wildlife Center of Roanoke

We’ve gotten oodles of Eastern Screech-Owls (Megascops asio) this fall and winter! While it’s normal to receive more raptors in the colder months, we usually see roughly the same amount of owls AND hawks… However, we’ve had mostly Screechies, and ALL have come in due to vehicle strikes!

They are expert nighttime hunters who sometimes like to wait by roadsides, since the open road makes it easy to spot their scurrying prey. Since they don’t know to look both ways before swooping in for the kill, they are frequent victims of vehicle strikes, often resulting in death for the owl.

Luckily for the 6 Eastern Screech-Owls currently in our care, all of them had disabling but treatable head trauma, bruising, and eye abrasions from their collisions. Even when they’re not feeling well, these tiny owls have BIG personalities and-to the human eye- very expressive faces!

This species comes in both red and gray morphs, with reds making up an estimated 1/3 of the Eastern Screechy’s population. However, since we’re on the eastern side of their range, we see the red morphs more often! This could also be a case of injured red Screechies being easier to spot on the side of the road, while the well-camouflaged grays go unseen more often.

If you haven’t ever heard the hauntingly adorable song of an Eastern Screech Owl, treat your ears to some recordings at the link below! (The aforementioned link!)

      • @[email protected]
        3•6 hours ago

        This picture is showing them looking at the eye. It’s a florescent dye that shows damage to the cornea. You might get this at the eye doctor, its the yellow drops. :)

        • anon6789OP
          1•4 hours ago

          You are both correct! I do think it looks like eye dye. I do have a post on eye damage I think I will share at some point. It’s very interesting to me, but also a little gross, so I’ve been a bit hesitant to share.

          As to the reflection, it turns out it is like a cat’s eyes. It’s a part of the back of the eye called the tapetum lucidum, and I put a bit about it in another comment on this post.

        • @[email protected]
          1•3 hours ago

          Ah. That explains it. Thank you.

          Turns out they have that reflective layer called Tapetum lucidum.

      • anon6789OP
        3•10 hours ago

        I don’t know if it’s so much a reflective layer. I tried looking this up for the recent Stygian Owl post. It sounds like the light hits the physical back of the eye (retina) and bounces back through that giant dilated pupil. With all the blood vessels back there, that gives that characteristic red eye from early digital camera photos. It’s hard to find things that explain enough without being written in language only medical/veterinary people can understand.

        Owls do have that semi-transparent third eyelid that cats have though! It’s called the nictitating membrane.

        • @[email protected]
          2•5 hours ago

          So it’s not reflective like in cats or deer. Just red… I mean yellow eye effect. Thanks.

          • anon6789OP
            1•4 hours ago

            It turns out I had an incomplete answer for you. The good news is now I have a better answer for you, and I also know a new bit of anatomy!

            First I found this: (I left in some extra facts because they are good facts, but the tapetum lucidum turns out to be the specific thing we’re after!)

            Owls’ enormous eyes help them take in enough light to see, even after the sun sets. Owl eyes make up as much as 5 percent of these birds’ total body weight. That may not sound like a lot, but for comparison, your eyeballs are about 0.0003 percent of your total weight.

            Like us, owls have two different types of light-sensitive cells in their retinas — rods (which detect light and movement) and cones (which distinguish color). Humans have about 20 rods for every cone, but in owls that ratio is more like 30 to one, making them exceptionally good at picking up movement even when it’s dark.

            If you’ve ever been out at night and seen owl eyes shining back from your flashlight beam, you no doubt noticed their reflective power, which is yet another way that owls enhance their night vision.

            Behind an owl eye’s rod-packed retina is another layer called the tapetum lucidum, which catches any light that may have passed through the retina and bounces it back to those sensitive rods. All of these adaptations add up: Some owl eyes may be as much as 100 times more sensitive in low light than ours. The one downside is that owls tend to be farsighted and experience difficulty focusing on objects at close range, but sensitive bristles around their beaks make up for this a bit, giving them another way to sense objects close to their faces.

            Armed with that new word, I checked out to see if kitties have that same body part:

            How Does It Work?

            When light enters a cat’s eye, it can take a few routes. Some of the light directly hits the retina, a layer at the back of the eyeball containing cells that are sensitive to light. These photoreceptor cells trigger nerve impulses that pass via the optic nerve to the brain, where a visual image is formed.

            Some of the light passes through or around the retina and hits the tapetum lucidum. The tapetum lucidum reflects visible light back through the retina, increasing the light available to the photoreceptors. This allows cats to see better in the dark than humans.

            In the last route, some of the light that bounces off the tapetum lucidum, misses the retina, and bounces back out of the cat’s eyes. This reflected light, or eyeshine, is what we see when a cat’s eyes appear to be glowing.

            Do Humans Have a Tapetum Lucidum?

            Though our eyes have much in common with cats’ eyes, humans do not have this tapetum lucidum layer. If you shine a flashlight in a person’s eyes at night, you don’t see any sort of reflection.

            The flash on a camera is bright enough, however, to cause a reflection off of the retina itself. This is the infamous “red-eye” in photographs. What you see is the red color from the blood vessels nourishing the eye.

            So that seems to tie all those stray facts together a bit more. Owls and cats can also get the same “red eye” as we get, but they also can get that yellow-green reflection depending on the angle the light is being sent/received.

            • @[email protected]
              2•3 hours ago

              Thanks! So they have it. With the right technical term in hands I found the wiki article. Cats, dogs, deer, owls. Usually nocturnal predators.

              Spiders have it, too. Shine a flashlight on a summer meadow. Thousands of little lights will shine back on you. Spider eyes! :)

              PS: really nice gif. 👍

              • anon6789OP
                2•3 hours ago

                I’ve been finding lately that sometimes asking the right question can be tougher than finding the answer on nice you know the right terms! 😅

                I knew about the spiders too, but I never knew it was all the same thing in each type of animal or the exact reason why the phenomenon occurred.