Powerful Owl - Ninox strenua

This is Gerald. He is a Powerful Owl chick.

Gerald bobs his head from side-to-side looking at the forest floor, because if you had a neck as flexible as an owl's you too would throw it about the place like Michael Jackson's pelvis. It allows him to hear and see better - owls have excellent hearing, and moving their head side-to-side helps them to triangulate sources of sound - it's like there's an enormous pair of 3D glasses in front of them, only the glasses can be used to look at sound. Moving their head side to side is like looking through each lens of the glasses, building a three-dimensional image of the sound. If you've ever had one of your eyes removed, and tried to watch a 3D movie in the cinema (we might not have all been there, but we certainly all have that friend), then you'd know that the best way to develop an actual 3D image is to move your good eye so rapidly between the two lenses that the whole image blurs together. Well, that's what owls do when they bob their heads.

Below, you can see Daniel. He is a fully grown, adult male Powerful Owl. He is also Gerald's father. He also has terrible taste in children's names.

Owls are anatomically incapable of rotating their eyes in their sockets - their eyes are simply too large. It's like having a brain that's literally too large to think, only it's an eye, and you have two of them. Doubly useless. However, they make up for it by having enormous pupils, letting extremely large amounts of light in, giving them excellent night vision. Bobbing and rotating their head (Daniel is demonstrating said rotation) makes up for this limit set by having eyes as big as the glands of an unvaccinated kid during a Mumps outbreak.

Sleep well. Listen out for the owls.