From Misty O’Neil Epstein
I love to capture something I have never seen before, an owl with a caterpillar!! Wow!! I was so surprised to see her fly in with one.
She held it in her mouth for a few minutes. I thought she was going to offer it to one of her nearby kids, but instead she ate her snack.
Noctowl uses Peck! It’s super effective!
I chews you
Now that is good! I wish I had come up with that one! 😄
Wonder how it tastes to them!
I always feel a little bad because I can’t imagine they’d get all that much pleasure from eating other than it means they won’t go hungry. Our sense of taste is tied to smell so much, but owls have notoriously bad noses, hence the skunk eating, and birds have at best around 5% of the taste buds we have, not sure where owls fall on that scale. It’s claimed they have real basic senses of sweet, bitter, and sour, but other than identifying food vs not food, I’m not sure how much info they get from having something in their mouth. They don’t even really chew a lot of stuff, and a lot will get swallowed whole, so they’d only really get fur/feather flavor, which is probably mostly dirt…yick.
That’s why I always hope their sleep is extra good, since in another cat-like way, they seem to mainly be sleeping or eating. I feel this is a downer answer, but it just may be my perspective. 😐
Aw I didn’t even think of that
These are the types of things that happen when a person spends entirely too much time thinking or talking about owls. 🤪
Haha true. I do have you tagged as “superb owl guy” when I learned how to add tags on voyager so that tracks lol
It’s-a-me! Owlio!
Yes!
Hey, owls gotta prioritize: watching, hooting, swooping, being awesome. All that “tasting” stuff is for animals with nothing better to do.
Can’t hoot with a full mouth!
Haha dark title ;) lovely shot, how long did you have to wait to get it? :)
I can’t see that type of caterpillar and think of anything else! I felt a little guilty about it, but I thought it was pretty slick. 😄
