From Greg Hottman
Eastern Screech-Owl; female. When I first spotted her, she was 7 feet from me and didn’t care. Went to grab the camera and tripod, like I was a potted plant to her. This morning (01/04/2026) when it was just getting light out. 20,000 ISO and 1.3 second exposure. Dane County
Scanning … Motion detected! Vole? (y/n): n Scanning …I can picture it with Terminator style HUD 😄
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel it’s really weird to assign animals gender just based on their sex? Like, I would say ‘they’, or ‘it’ if you think the animal is an object
I don’t think language has had enough time to catch up to how humanity as a whole looks at animals as sentient, individual beings.
At the same time, it’s not as though they’re being offended by how we refer to them in the way people could be. Our presence is offensive enough for them. 😁
A lot of the time it’s not possible to tell visually if the bird is male or female, so everyone falls back to whatever their default way of speech is. In this case though, the photographer seems to know which is which from seeing them nesting in a nest box and the male of the pair is red, so they are easily distinguished in this case.
Her gaze is the same as an orange cat. Having only 1 brain cell.
That’s a fair comparison! 😅
