Why do owls have sharp talons

The animal is then swallowed whole. Falcons are so skilled at disabling prey with a mid-air, high-speed strike that their talons are smaller than those of other raptors.

They just don't need them as much. Once they've landed, falcons "will quickly pluck the neck area and attempt to kill prey swiftly by breaking the neck with a bite attack.

Osprey have large, curved talons, almost like fishhooks — which is appropriate because they specialize in catching fish, swooping down and hitting them just below the water's surface. In addition to expanding understanding of these much-loved birds, the findings could help researchers understand the birds' dinosaur ancestors. The commotion warns other songbirds that an owl is in the area. Owls without visible tufts are called round-headed owls. If you looked deep under the head feathers of an owl, you would discover that it has a slit on each side of its skull.

Each slit is a flap of skin, called an ear conch pronounced konk , which opens into a large ear canal, as shown above. The rings of feathers are called the facial disc. Some owls have ears located directly across from each other, in symmetrical placement.

Others have asymmetrical placement, where an ear on one side of the head is located above the one on the other side of the head, which increases their ability to locate sound on a vertical axis. These owls use their uneven ears to judge exactly where sound is coming from.

If an owl hears a mouse rustling, perhaps even below a blanket of snow, the sound may reach one ear before it reaches the other ear. The owl moves its head until the noise reaches both ears at the same time.

Once an owl has done this, it has pinpointed the location of the sound and is ready to pounce — even if it has not seen its prey. The magnificent eyes of owls come in three colors. Owl species that live in North America have bright yellow or brown eyes. Some European owls have orange eyes. A thin tissue, called the iris, covers the front of the eye and gives the eyeball its color. At the center of the iris is the dark, round pupil. The pupil controls how much light gets into the eye. In the bright glare of a sunny day, the pupil shrinks to block out some of the light.

At night, the pupil expands to let in lots of light. People once thought that owls were blind during the day. This is false — the Ferruginous Pygmy-Owl, for example, is one of the many owl species that hunt in broad daylight. Some owl species have eyes larger than humans. Named after their shapes, these cells are called rods and cones.

Rods help to see in dim light. Cones help to see color. Their eyes contain very few cones, however, so what humans see in color looks mostly black and white to an owl. Binocular Vision. Some birds have an eye on each side of their head, like a robin, who sees one scene with its right eye and a completely different scene with its left. People and owls, with eyes located on the front of their face, have what is called binocular vision. What we see through one eye overlaps much of what we see through the other eye.

We see an object in front of us with both eyes. Binocular vision helps owls judge how far away an object is, what size it is, and how fast it is moving. By moving our eyes from side to side, humans have degrees field of vision, of which degrees is seen by both eyes.

Owls have about degrees field of vision, with up to 50 degrees seen with both eyes. When humans blink, our eyelids close from above, like window shades, briefly covering our eyes.

An owl does have upper lids, like us, which cover the whole eye when it blinks. The third set of eyelids, called nictitating membranes, stretches from the inside corner to the outside corner of each eye. Not really, although owls have the ability to look behind themselves.

While humans can look to the side just by shifting our eyes, an owl must turn its entire head to look left or right. Each enormous eyeball is locked in one position by bony plates called the sclerotic ring.

An owl would have to turn its whole head to the right and then to left to take in normal human field of vision. It hunts from the ground rather than the air. When it finds something to eat — such as a snake or a rodent — it stomps its prey with its feet! Some birds of prey, like the Crane Hawk, can bend their legs backward and forward at the tarsal joint. This allows them to reach inside tree cavities or crevices and root around with their feet to catch prey hiding inside.

Though it stands to reason that large raptors eat large prey and small raptors small prey, this is not always the case. An Orange-breasted Falcon, on the other hand, has very large feet compared to its body size and catches birds almost as big as it is! If you remember that raptor feet are best adapted for the prey they catch, it makes sense. An eagle captures and kills its prey with its feet.

Their feet help them balance atop carcasses and move around comfortably on the ground when they feed. Share this page:. Talons give clues to diet Raptors that eat large animals usually have short, strong toes.