Rubi
From the Scottish Owl Centre
Behind the scenes pics of some of the birds on today’s photo workshop with Dean Bricknell; Tony the Tawny loves these adventures into the woods; Mac the Short-eared Owl always looked ready to go-go-go; Rubi the newbie White Faced Owl and new kid Aspen the Tengmalm’s (or Boreal) Owl made their workshop debuts.
Aspen
Mac
Tony
That is a superb owl
Many here consider the White Faced Scops the total package of owliness!
It won the first Owl of the Year contest, and darn near stormed right through last year’s! It’s a cuddly size, striking colors, amazing orange eyes, loads of expression and strikes multiple stunning poses.
I did not realize there was a contest for owls. Now I understand why everyone gets so excited for Superb Owl Sunday every year. I’ll have to get tickets.
Oh, it is much fun. It last 2 weeks, plus last year we did a small qualifying round to fill out the bracket, and you all get to participate every day.
Basically, I make a bracket, and every day we have 2 rounds, Owl A vs Owl B, and Owl X vs Owl Y. Each owl gets a set of photos and a blurb showcasing why they are most awesome, and whichever gets the most upvotes in approx 24 hours wins the match. People will promote their choices in the comments and sometimes try to rally others to their side. It gets modestly competitive, everyone gets to learn some great facts about owls they might not have known existed, and people really seem to enjoy it.
Here is the ongoing post we had for last year, and it has the completed bracket and some vote counts if you want to see how it worked.
I love so much everything about this. Thank you
This year’s contest will kick off with another qualifier to eliminate some of the duds from the last bracket near mid-November.
We do have a lot of fun here. I get a number of people that say they don’t even really like owls that become regulars. Even I just had a modest interest when I started posting, and now I have over 1500 posts and I’m always doing more research because they are such fascinating animals.
I get it. I will 100% fly out to be a part of a Superb Owl party, and not just because I hear good things about the bean dip and the chicken wings.
My favorite part is the OotY cheerleaders. (They’re capybaras. Their cheers consist of sitting around in puddles and looking chill. Okay I made that up but it woudl be cool. :D
I’ve decided it’s cannon now.
Yes!
If there weren’t so many AI haters, I could do that! 😅
you could make a post asking for pictures/drawings of people’s favorite owls chilling with capybaras
Lesseee . . . Aspen iiiiis . . . Boreal?
Tengmalm’s
Wh-? What?
(or Boreal)
. . .
Yup, it’s Tengmalm to the Europeans. He was huge in the nature scene in the 1780s, and really liked owls, so after really improving the owl documentation of the day, they honored him by naming this owl after him (Strix tengmalmi). It turns out he was not the first to have documented this owl as it was originally though, plus it’s no longer in genus Stix, and now it’s in genus Aegolius established 1829, and has its original species name funerea, but the Europeans got used to calling it Tengmalm’s Owl, so they just stuck with it.
As cute as these little owls are, Aegolius is from the Greek aigōlios meaning “a bird of ill omen” and funerea is from the Latin funereus, meaning “funereal.” That’s one heck of a dark name for this cutie pie!
The ones in the US and Canada are technically a subspecies Aegolius funerea richardsoni, aka Richardson’s Owl, after Canadian naturalist John Richardson.
As cute as these little owls are, Aegolius is from the Greek aigōlios meaning “a bird of ill omen” and funerea is from the Latin funereus, meaning “funereal.” That’s one heck of a dark name for this cutie pie!
Probalby from the Dark Ages where everything was like emo but not cool at all ;D
It’s only a bad omen to me when I don’t get to see one! 🥰
Exactly!
