"Just act like we don't know him!" 😆
I think the bracket did its job pretty well last year since I had the prior year's popularity numbers to work with. The popular ones got to the finals, as they should, but it got progressively harder for them to stay in. At least half the bracket was competitive to the point if any of the top 50% had won, nobody would be too upset about it. Here's the bracket and score comparison post for reference. Even some of the newer ones that did poorly have been becoming more popular this year like Philippine/Indian Scops and Mottled Wood Owl.
Also Snowy frustration is as high as Burrow Owl frustration. Snowy is one I thought would dominate both times, and it did soooo well, but then you get people coming out like, nah, he gets enough attention as it is, so you get that spoiler effect which is exciting to see. Kicking someone out from the start would kill initial excitement IMO. If you're a die hard for someone like WFS and it has zero chance of winning, I can see you not participating, but if you get invested, even if it gets bumped, you still want to see the one who knocked it out get taken down.
I don't think I have any planned tweaks from last year at this moment, as I thought last year went near perfect, but I'm always thinking about it.
I don't remember the number offhand, but I expected Buffy to fair better, but I think a number of its fans have dropped off Lemmy or the community.
White Face seemed ready to steamroll everyone, which surprised me, as I don't get too much WFS content to keep the momentum high compared to some others.
I love the surprises, and I'm glad we've had different winners both times so far. I wouldn't be upset if one won twice, but I'd personally prefer not to have the same one win back to back. My goal is to get you guys excited about new things!
Some are always going to be more popular, but I wouldn't want this place to just be the same 3 owls every day. With 250 to choose from, there's gotta be a few more I can get you all pumped up about! 😁
Oh that is interesting. I always think those little TE units sound great and I love what others do with them in live jams, but the price and workflow makes my brain wince. It's cool to see them experimenting with pricing. Taking yourself into unfamiliar workflows sounds like a great way to steer yourself toward different results.
I'm relatively new in my journey with keyed instruments. I went into it originally wanting a synth of some sort, but the gf says her ears bleed from me watching gear video. I ended up with a Mark I Rhodes, and that lead me to taking piano lessons, so now I'm at the opposite end of where I started, though I hook my Roland piano to a laptop to play with VSTs and I have a Verselab to do electronic stuff when she's out doing stuff.
It's amazing how different the Rhodes, the piano, and a synth or organ are to use in a way that sounds correct, even though they all look like the same instrument. I feel I developed a lot musically from messing with all of them and I've learned to appreciate sounds and styles and genres I never would have pictured myself as interested in before.
I hope you have a lot of fun with it!
Say what you will, he would have put 110% into finding where this owl came from in Andy asked him. 😁
The Burrowing Owl people have been very passionate and vocally upset both times. They're perennially favorites, much like the love the Snowy gets, but the little guys haven't been able to get that final push over the top. They certainly have what it takes though!
Great question!
I haven't encountered what looks to be called "fright molt" at all yet in my "studies" and this blog post from Suffolk Owl Sanctuary describes owls as being very slow molters. The only type of exception that I've seen is with Screech Owls dropping most of their head feathers, which don't affect flight near as much as other big bald patches would, resulting in situations like our friend Weird Alice where they look like they were treated a bit roughly, but it's basically just a bad haircut.
This post from a buzzard blog says fright molt is basically unheard of for raptors. I know I tend to think of agility as something very important to a raptor, and also since they're also likely more often the aggressor than the victim, it may not be worth it from an evolution standpoint to lose those feathers all at once. I'll have to keep an eye out for more info.
I will say, I posted an AskLemmy asking about people's favorite items of clothing and someone said the Cuddl Duds fleece pants. I was in need of some new pajama type bottoms, and I love my Cuddl Duds (not a sponsor) flannel sheets, so I was all, let's try the pants.
If the owl is as happy with its fuzzy legs as I was during the cool months in those pants, that's one happy and snug owl!
It really adds that air of credibility. Most owls have that bristley moustache, which is a good start, but a bushy white beard adds that authenticity of being a wise one of the outdoors. It's not the look of an owl that follows trends, but rather the confidence to be one's self and pursues their own truth and experiences. 😊
From Cape Coral Friends of Wildlife
Check out the winners below, and there are 8 more honorable mention winners at the non-social.media hosted link above!
Adult Winners:
1st Place – Conrad Peloquin
2nd Place – Damon Bell
3rd Place – Robert K. Brinley
Youth Winners:
1st Place – Adalynn Miller
2nd Place – August Lambert
3rd Place – Josh Pilon
From Wild Eye Wanderer
Pair of Mottled Wood Owl
Kumbhargaon, Maharashtra |
Feb'25
Bonus pic!
From Vishal Lokare
Two souls, one perch-honoring the power of togetherness
Shot on Nikon Z8 with 200-500 mm
Pune Maharashtra India
Feb 2025
A watchful barn owl, from a vantage point on a fence post, scours his surroundings on the lookout for prey in Croydon, south London. Photograph: Tomos Brangwyn
From The Guardian
It is dusk, a short walk from the big Ikea in Croydon, and a barn owl is emerging from its nest to hunt. In the fading light, the male owl sits on a fence post to survey the rough grass below. He has a busy evening ahead: he is responsible for feeding a roosting female for the next few weeks while she cares for their chicks. The owl hops to another fence post. Suddenly, he dives into the grass below, emerging a minute later with an unlucky rodent, and flies back into the nest.
“I still get really excited,” says Tomos Brangwyn, a local enthusiast who monitors the site, lowering his binoculars. “He’ll do that most of the night. It’s a great sign that there’s a female in there that we haven’t seen for a while, as she’s on the eggs,” he says.
The scrubland is surrounded by urban sprawl. Police sirens and souped-up cars roar past, and industrial buildings hum under harsh security lights nearby. Central London is less than 10 miles (16km) away, but the barn owls here are unperturbed, feasting on the same diet of voles, rats, mice and other small animals as their country cousins. This patch of land has supported as many as three breeding pairs in recent years.
Owl sightings have risen sharply in the capital, monitoring data shows, with Londoners increasingly seeing the birds in green areas and back gardens. There were just 25 barn owl sightings in 2010, but 347 spotted a decade later.
A barn owl goes hunting at night in the Croydon area. City birds will enjoy the same diet of voles, rats, mice and other small animals as their country cousins. Photograph: Tomos Brangwyn
“People might not think owls are in London. But they don’t realise how wild the city actually is,” says Becky Garden, a partnership officer for Greenspace Information for Greater London CIC (GiGL), which records environmental data for the capital.
All of the UK’s owl species – the tawny, barn, short-eared, long-eared and little – can be found in the capital at various points of the year. The shy, nocturnal hunters can be hard to monitor, with almost no reliable population surveys performed for many years. Sighting data is considered a measure of presence, rather than of population size, as it may also be driven by the rise of popular citizen science apps and awareness campaigns such as the Owl Prowl run by London Wildlife Trust. But most Londoners are probably not far away from an owl, even if they never see them, says Garden. “Records of owls in London have increased quite a lot from about 2016,” she says.
Tawny owls – known for the “twit twoo” duet sung by males and females to each other – are found in green areas throughout the capital, nesting in hollow tree species and even known to prey on green parakeets. Reports of sightings have increased from 159 in 2010 to 894 in 2020.
Short- and long-eared owls are infrequent winter visitors. Little owls are found in larger parks, similar to barn owls. But barn owls have also been spotted in Notting Hill, Deptford and other places that were probably one-off visits. The birds sometimes surprise Londoners: last month, journalist Ash Sarkar posted a photo of one in north London on social media under the tagline “Wtf is a barn owl doing in Tottenham???”.
A captured barn owl has its data recorded – the species has experienced a significant recovery in recent years. Photograph: Tomos Brangwyn
The apparent resurgence of the barn owl reflects broader national trends, with the species experiencing a significant recovery in recent years. The last thorough survey in the mid-90s estimated the population to be about 4,000 breeding pairs in the UK, but the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) believes it may now exceed 10,000. It is no longer listed as a threatened species in the UK, benefiting from a rollout of barn owl boxes and sufficient habitat to hunt rodents. But the overall owl population is not as healthy.
“With the exception of the barn owl, they are all not doing brilliantly. There’s a bit of a decline across the board. It is most pronounced in the little owl, that seems to be having a really tough time of it, linked to insect decline,” says Jon Carter from the BTO. “But barn owls have turned a bit of a corner. They are doing really, really well.”
The owls are reasonably common in large gardens, town parks and city areas, Carter says. “Wherever you live, if you’ve got bit of leafy stuff around, odds are there are going to be owls nearby,” he says. “Because they sleep all day long and are as quiet as anything at night when they’re flying around hunting, people just don’t really notice them unless they’re right outside the window hooting away.”
I did some more searching and found this article and also this article.
The first article is pretty good and gives a god amount of general info about feathers, feather growth, and associated problems. With raptors relying on maneuverability provided by the tail, that loss of agility compounded with the energy requirements of having to regrow feathers creates a dangerous situation for a bird of prey. There are also associated problems with stress feather loss and infections or damage of the follicles that can occur that can prevent those feathers from ever growing back.
The second article talks about how they never release a raptor with damaged tail feathers, as they are so important to the birds' success in the wild and talks more about molting and imping, the grafting of sound donor feathers onto the shafts of damaged feathers so most function is restored until the bird can shed and regrow them naturally.
With their size and hunting style, tails seem to play a critical role for raptors.