PLEASE READ. WILL NOT HURT TO AND FORWARD. Kids Are Putting Drano, Tin Foil, And A Little Water In Plastic

SILENT NIGHT

you are a mouse.

and right now, you’re scuttling around the forest floor going about your mousey business. you have many adorable mouse children to feed, after all.

distantly, you hear a faint shriek like the sound of failing anti-lock breaks.

you pause for a moment, then resume your foraging. it was probably nothing! you are a mouse and lack creative prediction abilities. you are just thinking that maybe later you’ll engage in some traditional mouse activities and pee in a sleeping bag or two, when 

BAM

suddenly, you are now a mousey corpse being borne skyward at upwards of thirty miles per hour. you would probably marvel at this, if you weren’t just a mouse and now also dead. your sad little corpse will be swallowed whole and your children will be eaten by, I dunno, frogs or something. nature is a real bitch sometimes.

congrats, you’ve just made the brutal acquaintance of the Grim Reaper of the rodent world:

HOLY NIGHT, YIKES.

but enough dramatic bullshit! you aren’t a mouse anymore, you’re a person reading a very informative and interesting article about Barn Owls which was written by a very handsome and modest genius. ahem. anyway. compared to some of the birds I’ve featured in Weird Biology before, Barn Owls may seem pretty normal! at least on the surface. (spoiler alert: Barn Owls Are Not Normal. at all.)

Barn Owls are mediumish owls that look kind of like a toasty loaf of bread, if that loaf had a pair of pitch-black nightmare eyeballs revealing a door into eternal darkness. (IF YOU LOOK INTO A BARN OWL’S EYES, THE ABYSS DOES INDEED GAZE BACK.) they reach a little over a foot long, with a three-foot wingspan. and like all owls, Barn Owls are stupidly light, tipping the scales at a whole pound and a half at the absolute most. this might not seem that big, but if that pound and a half is strafing towards you at 60+ mph talons first, it puts a whole new perspective on the situation.

so where do Barn Owls live, anyway? well. a better question to ask would be, “where do Barn Owls NOT live, Jesus Christ.”

Antarctica. the answer is Antarctica.

Barn Owls are what we call a “cosmopolitan species”, meaning they live fucking everywhere. they can be found in farmlands, woodlands, and grasslands across EVERY MAJOR CONTINENT and MOST LARGE ISLANDS worldwide! (except Antarctica, for obvious reasons.) this, if you couldn’t tell, is completely fucking ridiculous. especially for a species of owl, which tend to be mediocre fliers and grouchy homebodies.

in fact, Barn Owls have the widest distribution of any non-seabird avian in the entire world! these stubby birds of prey may look like toasted mashmallows, but they’re tenacious fliers and extremely adaptable predators who can be active day or night and will eat anything up to and including a slice of cheese pizza. these fluffy bastards even turn up regularly in New Zealand, and god only knows how they even got over there. (there’s now a stable breeding population there, to the regret of the rats.)

maybe they just called an Uber.

but aside from their adaptable tenacity, Barn Owls are pretty standard as owls go. by which I mean they’re a shambling heap of bizarro traits barely even recognizable as a bird! where should we start? 

EYEBALLS. let’s start with eyeballs.

like all owls, Barn Owls have eyeballs that are modified for UNIMAGINABLE low-light vision. they don’t see color very well, but that’s a hell of a trade of for having basically a set of night-vision goggles for eyeballs! and to cap it all off, these lucky bastards see just fine in daylight, too.

but this amazing vision comes with a price.

it’s a really weird price, too. not like the standard “first-born child” bullshit or anything.

having excellent night and day vision is fairly rare in nature, and Barn Owls had to pull some biological strings to get it- their eyeballs are more of a modified tube than the traditional Orb. yes, that’s insane. and also yes, this means the Barn Owl can’t actually move its eyes to look around like you and I can. so what do they do instead? 

why, they’ve developed loose tendons and ligaments in their neck that allow them nearly 270 degrees of rotation, that’s what they did! a perfectly logical and sane response that give NO ONE the screaming meemies OR the heebie jeebies! for sure!

…yeah okay, that’s actually pretty adorable.

but these two biological hat tricks pale in comparison to the Barn Owls’ true source of strength, the reason for their hunting prowess! which is… the ability to hear real good. REAL GOOD. Barn Owls have hearing keen enough to pick up a mouse fart in a windstorm, but they can also peg the GPS location of that poor embarrassed mouse down to within a couple inches! impressive, right? this is because their ears are sideways.

kind of, anyway. Barn Owl ears are two holes under the feathers at the edge of their attractive facial disc, and one of them is a few centimeters higher than the other. like maybe god stuck a pencil into one of them and just yanked it off kilter, or something. but there’s a method to this madness- having off-centered ears gives the Barn Owl a true reckoning of where a sound is happening in 3d space by tracking which ear receives a sound first. they’re basically a biological sonar receiver.

but I’ve saved the last for least! let’s get into the ability that really puts the cherry on this creeptacular Barn Owl cake. 

all is calm! all is bright!

Barn Owls are utterly and completely silent fliers. (when they aren’t making noises like a demon caught in a paper shredder, anyway.) one could flap three inches in front of your face in a dark room and you would never know. this is because every feather on their wings and body is edged in soft fringes that absorb sound, basically turning Barn Owls into flying private screenings of The Quiet Place.

and this absolute silence gives them a MASSIVE edge in hunting! Barn Owls hunt by flying just above the ground at absolutely insane speeds and just kind of picking up whatever smaller creature tickles their dinnertime fancies. usually this dinner is small rodents and rabbits, but Barn Owls can and will eat anything they can get the drop on up to and including SLEEPING HAWKS. smaller owl dinners like mice get swallowed whole (aaaaaaa), and their bones and fur are regurgitated later (AAAAAAAAA).

a normal bird!

so with everything they have going for them, how are Barn Owls doing on the global stage in these difficult times? pretty fucking great, actually! Barn Owls are decreasing in some areas but increasing rapidly in others, and overall they’re ranked as Least Concern. this is likely because Barn Owls really don’t have a problem coexisting with humans!

Barn Owls love to hang out in human structures (like barns! wild, right? WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED.) and eat a lot of species that humans consider to be pests, like rats and mice. it’s a win-win for both owls and humans, and it definitely helps that Barn Owls are routinely misidentified as cryptids (*coughcoughmothmancough*) or the tortured souls of the damned! (it’s because they scream at night and kind of look like the accursed shades of the dead, doomed to forever walk the earth in torment.) here’s hoping that this silent avian predator sticks around for a long, long time to come.

SLEEP IN HEAVENLY PEACE.

–

thanks for reading! you can find the rest of the Weird Biology series on my tumblr here, or check out the official archive at weirdbiology.com!

if you enjoy my work, maybe buy me a coffee and support Weird Biology!

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–

IMAGE SOURCES

img1- Birds in Backyards img2- All About Birds img3- Birders Store img4- Mother Nature Network img5- Lisa L. Kee img6- Norfolk Wildlife Trust img7- Roy Rimmer img8- Steven Boyce

*Sobs forever*

Concept: combine the “you don’t know you live on a death world until you leave it” trope with the whole Cthulhu-in-space genre of weird fiction, except in reverse: humanity’s Special Thing™ is that humans (and, by extension, all terrestrial life-forms) are weirdly resistant to reality-bending bullshit, which is what lets us survive and build a relatively functional civilisation in spite of hailing from a world that plays host to multiple Other Gods – which is, of course, otherwise unheard of; having even one of those squamous bastards in the neighbourhood is generally enough to ruin a whole star system’s day.

Non-human vessels can’t approach within a dozen light years of Sol without their crews being driven mad by the corrosive psychic resonance emanating from Earth’s deepest oceans, and we’re wandering around living our lives and not noticing. Aliens can never travel on human ships because our FTL drives kind of maybe tunnel through Hell, a process that horribly warps non-terrestrial life, and we just think it looks pretty when the n-dimensional hellfire coruscates across the viewports.

This sort of thing kept humanity uncontacted for a long time, until the aliens’ observers eventually figured out that we weren’t a bunch of weirdly normal-looking elder thralls, we just straight up weren’t aware there was a problem. It’s only then that they arranged first contact – remotely, of course – to basically ask “dude, what the fuck?”

(Humans are reasonably well-integrated into the galactic community these days, though most worlds enforce strict screening and quarantine procedures before allowing a Terran traveller planetside; it’s just like a human to have a class 7 epistemivore hitchhiking in their brain, and when informed, go “you know, I have been getting these headaches lately”.)

GEE FRISK HOW COME YOU GOATMOM LETS YOU HAVE SO MANY PARENTS

based on this

TTWTT I.... bootiful, just bootiful.

catch, and release

that paper about how adhd is only viewed through the lens of capitalism.. i think thats why all the advice neurotypical psychs give adhd people is basically "you cant do this thing very well so make sure to do it extra good". they literally can't concieve of someone living a life without strict deadlines and monotonous routine. not to mention that they never mention anything about the severe emotional processing symptoms because peoples mental health issues and disabilities are always categorized by the ways in which they impact a person's ability to produce profit and not by the pain and suffering they can cause

bending laws of physics is easy for us 

I

... 

Help him

Illustrated some book covers for the highly accurate Tony Stark book series :^)

A message from what some might consider a ghost.

 A commanding voice no one has heard in eighteen years booms through the holonet, disrupting signals, heard in every corner of the galaxy; a swift and sure blade, ready to strike through the heart of the Empire. 

“This is Jedi Knight, General Anakin Skywalker of the Republic Clone Army. I have a message for Sheev Palpetine, our so-called ‘Emperor.’ Time is up, old man. It doesn’t matter how powerful you think you are, or how many guards and sith apprentices you surround yourself with. I’m going to burn you and your Empire to the ground.”

It ends as abruptly as it began. 

And the galaxy quakes.

I was today years old when I learned that when you type "otp: true" in AO3 search results it filters out fics with additional ships, leaving only the fics where your otp is the main ship