• Most owls have a right ear larger than their left. • Owls can hear their prey under the earth. • If you look into an owl's ear, you can see the • Unlike most birds’ eyes, an owl's are on the front of its face, rather than at the sides. • Owls’ eyes are tubular and cannot move in their sockets. To make up for this, owls can turn their heads through 270° and nearly upside down without moving their body. • Owls have 14 cervical vertebrae, twice as many as humans and all other mammals except sloths and manatees. • Owls have specialised wings and feathers that allow them to fly in almost total silence. • An owl can fly within inches of its prey without being detected. • The main predators of owls are other species of owl. • Pygmy owls and Northern Hawk owls have patches on the back of their heads that look like eyes, to convince other birds they are being watched at all times. • The northern hawk owl can detect a vole up to half a mile away. • The largest species of owl is a hundred times the size of the smallest. • Eagle owls can carry off and eat a small deer. • The greater sooty owl's call sounds like a falling bomb. • The ancient Greek for owl is and is onomatopoeic, rather as if we called owls ‘tuwit-tuwoos’. • Barn owls swallow their prey whole and eat up to 1,000 mice each year. • A pair of barn owls and their offspring consume 4,000 rodents a year. • In French, the common barn owl is , ‘the fright of the bell towers’.
