Owls (order: Strigisformes) are mostly nocturnal hunters and live in places like forests, to even tundra and deserts.
With their large eyes, owls see better at night than we can during the day. Many owls hunt at dawn or dusk (crespuscular
vs. nocturnal) to use the extra light. Owls only have to family groups world wide, the Barn Owls (Tytonidae) and
all others, or True Owls (Strigidae). Barn Owls are different, because of their heart-shaped facial disk and they do not hoot.
They also have a specialized 3rd toe which is thought to help them preen the facial disk.
European Eagle Owls (Bubo bubo;strigidae) are the lagest of all the owl species. They, like other
raptors, cannot move their eyes in their sockets, but they can rotate their heads 270 degrees, while we can only rotate ours
180 degrees. Barn Owls (Tytonidae) have smaller eyes, comparitively, than the True Owls (Strigidae). They have binocular
vision, like us.
Owls are very silent hunters, their wing are built differently than the other raptors. They have soft ends
on their feathers to help aid them to be silent, and for getting to prey undetected.
The ways owl's toes are when perched is different from all diurnal raptors (except the osprey), two face forward, and
two face backwards, this arrangement is called zygodactylic.
Some owls' ear placement is also sometimes strange to better locate their prey, they are far better at
pinpointing where sounds are coming from than we are. Owls are cosmopolitain, living everywhere except in Antarctica.
There are 37 different species of North American Owls.
