Scops Owl
£2.40
A Scops Owl greeting card featuring a Scops Owl – a tiny owl that is big on attitude – looking right at us with one eye half closed.
– Blank inside for your own message
– Printed in the UK on premium card stock
– Supplied with a white envelope
In stock
Description
Scops Owl Greeting Card
A Scops Owl greeting card featuring a Scops Owl – a tiny owl that is big on attitude – looking right at us with one eye half closed. Is he winking?
Scops owls are native to central Africa, North and South America, Europe and Central Asia. In fact, pretty much everywhere except Australasia.
This Scops owl is a sweetie, isn’t he. Well maybe you wouldn’t think so if you were a rodent. On the plus side they are monogamous and the females are larger than the males.
Is he winking, do you think? Is he tilting his head a bit? The thing is, that we humans are good at detecting the direction from which a sounds come. We are actually better at it that almost any other animal.
We detect the direction of high-pitched sounds by the difference in the intensity of the sound in each ear. That’s because high-pitched sounds are blocked by our bodies, so less sound reaches the ear further from where the sound comes from.
We detect the direction of low-pitched sounds differently because they work their way around our heads and we can tell the direction from which the sound came because of the slightly longer time it takes for the sound to reach the ear that is further from the sound.
What we are not so good at is telling whether the place where the sound originated is higher or lower than us, or whether it is at the same level. Owls on the other hand, are masters of this. That’s part of their strategy for hunting. They can do it because they have one ear higher than the other. It’s not easy to see that, however, because their ears are hidden under tufts of feathers.
This might explain why we tilt our heads to one side when we are trying to locate some sounds – putting one ear higher than the other to help fix the position of the sound.
Back to the Scops Owl in this Scops Owl Greeting Card – maybe he is not tilting his head at all – maybe his face looks slightly lopsided because of his asymmetric ears.
And then, maybe he is not a he but a she. So please read the word she for every occurrence of the word he as an alternative in the foregoing.
SKU: C0013