I tried looking this up again. Finding fish owls hunting seems to be pretty difficult, and I found a clip of one hunting a fish, but not an eel. I did come across a few Youtube Shorts of people using a few different methods of hunting eels by hand in the shallows which could explain a few things. One person was pulling them out from under rocks along the waterline. Another was in mud that was a little soupier than a thin pudding/gravy and he would grab them as they stuck their heads out of the mud to breathe.

I also watched a video of a person somewhere near me fishing for them with a small fishing pole in a shallow creek off the Delaware River. I’m not certain how similar American eels are to Asiatic ones, but I imagine they have some similarities. He said they are mostly nocturnal and they hide under rocks during the day. He said they are able to hide in surprisingly small spaces, so deep water doesn’t seem to be a necessity for them. He also mentioned they migrate to the sea to breed, and they can cross land to do so, so they can be on land for a fair bit of time compared to a fish. They seem to have poor sight, which may also make them easy to grab.

I can share the Shorts if you’d like to see them, but I know some people hate Shorts, or I can capture some images. There is also a short Nat Geo video of a Buffy catching a small fish if you’d like to see that. Just let me know.

Also, if you look at the community banner, I try to find something supposedly representative of the environment where the Owl of the Year lives, and with it being the Buffy this year, I tried to find a forested Thai creek where it looked like it would be a place where an owl could snag some freshwater snackies.

One last fact the American guy said that I’m curious to look into more: he said the eel blood is poisonous to humans. I forget if that is just fresh blood or if it’s still poisonous after it’s cooked, but he said to be cautious of that. It’s supposedly the eel that’s used in sushi, so I’ve eaten a ton of it, so that sounds like something that would be fun to know more about.

I hope some of this was helpful, and like I said, if you want some videos or screen grabs, let me know and I can get you those after my work settles down a bit.