New analysis into the bizarre methods snow distorts sound affords new hints concerning the extraordinary searching methods of a winter phantom—the Nice Grey Owl.

From the Winter 2024 concern of Dwelling Chicken journal. Subscribe now.

Maybe no species of owl is as fantastically tailored for searching in snow because the Nice Grey.

Discovered all through the boreal forests of the Northern Hemisphere, Nice Grey Owls dine totally on small mouselike rodents referred to as voles. In winter, voles retreat to tunnels deep below the snow—however that doesn’t cease Nice Grays. Looking from an uncovered perch, an owl listens intently for its goal, then swoops down from above, punching by way of the crust of snow with its lengthy, highly effective legs. Capable of attain prey virtually 18 inches under the floor of the snow, Nice Grey Owls have been identified to penetrate snow crusts thick sufficient to assist a 175-pound individual.

What hasn’t been clear, regardless of a long time of analysis about Nice Grey Owls, is how they do it—how do Nice Grays hunt prey animals now not than a ballpoint pen, which they will’t see, utilizing solely faint burrowing sounds greater than a foot below the snow to information them in plunging strikes with surgical precision?

Some intriguing new hints arrived just lately by way of quirky analysis performed by an unlikely pair of scientists. One, a California biologist who had spent most of his profession learning the sounds made by hummingbird feathers, had lengthy dreamed of working with owls; the opposite, a Canadian knowledgeable on owl area biology, had all the time wished to check sound.

Of their research, the researchers explored how Nice Grey Owls use a set of finely tuned diversifications for gathering sound and localizing its supply in deep snow. The Nice Grey Owl’s facial disc, a bowl-shaped circle of feathers that frames its face, is the biggest of any owl species, accumulating and directing even the softest sounds from the surroundings towards its ears. And like different owls that hunt by sound, its ears, hidden below feathers, are asymmetrical. A better ear opening on one facet than the opposite enhances its potential to pinpoint a sound’s exact location.

To check the hunting-by-hearing capabilities of Nice Grays, the researchers used an array of microphones buried below the snow to hold out a posh and distinctive set of experiments within the chilly of Manitoba. Their analysis, revealed within the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B in November 2022, uncovered new hints concerning the bizarre methods snow muffles and distorts sound—and the Nice Grey Owl’s unimaginable potential to listen to a vole hidden within the snow, which it seems relies upon largely on the owl’s distinctive feathers.

Two Unlikely Consultants Group Up

“I’m a hummingbird biologist. I do know this a lot about working with owls,” admits Chris Clark, holding up his thumb and pointer finger with a tiny hole between them.

Clark, a biology professor on the College of California, Riverside, started his profession learning the mechanical sounds hummingbirds make with their feathers throughout show flights. About 14 years in the past, he turned fascinated with the other idea—how some birds (particularly owls) reduce the noise they’d in any other case naturally produce in flight. He initially struggled to get any owl area analysis off the bottom, however in 2021, he was contacted by a nature documentary crew making a movie about animal sounds. And, the filmmakers talked about, they had been additionally working with a Nice Grey Owl knowledgeable in Manitoba.

That knowledgeable was Jim Duncan. Duncan has been learning Nice Grays for nearly 4 a long time, and after he retired because the director of Manitoba’s fish and wildlife company in 2018, he began his personal nonprofit group, Uncover Owls, targeted on analysis, outreach, and conservation. Duncan remembers when, as a PhD scholar on the College of Manitoba, he performed his first analysis on Nice Grey Owls and spent the evening in a snow hut referred to as a quinzhee. On a bitterly chilly February evening on the Taiga Organic Station in japanese Manitoba, Duncan realized how snow muffled exterior sounds.

“You don’t hear any person strolling as much as your quinzhee till they’re proper exterior,” he says. “So it simply turned this nagging query in my thoughts: What sounds are these owls listening to, and the way are they utilizing them to catch meals?”

The main focus of his PhD dissertation was elsewhere, and he lacked the coaching and gear essential to pursue that query, so he set the query apart— till, over 30 years later, the documentary crew launched him to an knowledgeable on chook flight and sound in California.

Quickly, Clark paid for a aircraft ticket out of his personal pocket, packed every bit of heat clothes he owned alongside along with his acoustic evaluation gear, and headed for Manitoba. On the floor, the objectives of their collaboration had been easy: to check how snow would possibly take up and warp the sounds of voles and the way that may have an effect on Nice Grey Owl searching methods.

“Owl Ears” vs. “Mouse Ears”

Nice Grays use stealthy flight to shock their unsuspecting prey. Owls usually are identified for flying virtually silently, however intriguingly, Nice Grays take these traits to the intense. Of all owl species on the planet, Nice Grays have the longest comblike serrations on the main edges of their wings, and the thickest velvety coating on their flight feathers—each evolutionary diversifications for silent flight that cut back wing noise to virtually nothing.

There are, says Clark, two main hypotheses to elucidate why owls advanced to fly quietly: “What I name the owl-ear speculation and the mouse-ear speculation.” The owl-ear speculation is that owls fly quietly to keep away from interfering with their very own potential to detect prey by sound; the mouse-ear speculation is that they’re attempting to keep away from being detected by potential prey.

“Though these hypotheses aren’t mutually unique,” explains Clark, “there are some instances the place they make completely different predictions, and the number-one case is when the surroundings itself blocks sound,” resembling when there’s a thick layer of snow on the bottom. The owl-ear speculation suggests {that a} snow-hunting owl ought to have particularly well-developed quieting options, in order that it might hear its muffled prey over the sound of its personal wings. Below the mouse-ear speculation, nonetheless, quieting options can be much less essential, as a result of the snow would supply the owl with pure stealth.

However snow does extra to sound than merely dampen it. A snowpack is surprisingly advanced, half ice and half air, with completely different densities at completely different depths—all affecting the transmission of sound. High and low sounds cross by way of snow in numerous methods, and due to the completely different speeds at which sound travels by way of air and ice, snow would possibly even refract sound, bending it in order that it appears to come back from a unique location than its precise supply.

Heading to a website 60 miles northeast of Winnipeg, the place Duncan knew owls hunted, he and Clark situated recent plunge holes from Nice Grays pursuing voles. They dug into the snowpack and slipped a water-resistant speaker beneath, enjoying white noise or recordings of voles digging. Then, they pointed an acoustic digital camera that Clark lugged from his UC–Riverside lab on the snow. An acoustic digital camera makes use of an array of 40 microphones to localize the place a sound seems to be coming from, then superimposes this obvious supply location on a digital camera picture.

Working with digital gear in temperatures as little as –16°F offered some difficulties: “I’ve solely skilled chilly temperatures like that a few occasions earlier than in my life,” says Clark, the Californian. Each the laptop computer he used to run the acoustic digital camera and the audio system enjoying the sounds repeatedly froze up and stopped working, limiting the variety of trials they had been in a position to do. In the end, Clark and Duncan had been solely in a position to full six profitable trials with the buried speaker.

However even these six trials had been sufficient to supply some intriguing new insights into the challenges a Nice Grey Owl faces when searching in winter—and the way it overcomes these challenges.

Refraction, Attenuation, and Acoustic Mirage

The outcomes from the acoustic digital camera supplied detailed information about how snow impacts sound in two methods: refraction and attenuation.

On this case, attenuation is the time period for the best way a blanket of snow muffles sounds. Clark and Duncan’s outcomes confirmed that low-frequency sound is far much less affected than high-frequency sound, making Nice Grey Owls’ huge facial discs—particularly well-suited for gathering low-frequency sound—a great adaptation for searching in deep snow. However the acoustic digital camera additionally confirmed the second, weirder means snow impacts sound. Sound is certainly bent because it travels by way of the snowpack, shifting its obvious supply by as a lot as 5 levels relative to the precise place of the buried speaker— a phenomenon that Clark and Duncan dubbed an “acoustic mirage.”

This impact is minimized whenever you pay attention from straight above the sound’s true supply, which helps clarify a particular facet of Nice Grey Owl searching conduct: hovering. Simply earlier than an owl plunges into the snow, it typically hovers in midair for a number of moments, frenetically beating its wings. This tactic possible provides an owl an opportunity to lock in on a vole’s precise place from the purpose the place the acoustic mirage is minimized. Some fish-eating birds—resembling ospreys, kingfishers, and gannets—choose to strike straight down at their underwater prey for related causes, though they’re coping with water bending gentle as a substitute of bending sound.

Clark sees two attainable ways in which these snow sound results may play into Nice Grey Owl excessive diversifications for quiet flight. On the one hand, maybe the owls’ quieting options on their wing feathers particularly suppress low-frequency sound, making certain that sound from an owl’s personal wings doesn’t intervene with its potential to listen to the low-frequency digging sounds of the voles. Or, maybe (and that is the state of affairs he thinks is extra possible) they might be particularly suppressing sound throughout hovering, in order to not intervene with an owl’s potential to focus on its prey precisely throughout this significant ultimate second.

“Once they’re hovering, you’ll be able to see the feathers at the back of the wing lifting up. That’s a sign that a part of the wing is stalling, which is when the air stops flowing easily over the floor of the wing and begins to kind loads of turbulence,” says Clark. Turbulence creates sound, which these wing options may have advanced to counteract. Different birds that hover whereas searching, resembling kestrels and harriers, have velvety wing coatings like owls.

Each of those potentialities are according to the owl-ear speculation, not the mouse-ear speculation. Neither rationalization for the owl’s quieting diversifications is about serving to the owl sneak up on voles, which might’t hear the owl coming regardless, buried as they’re below a sound-attenuating blanket of snow. As an alternative, based on Clark and Duncan, these diversifications make sure that Nice Grays can hear voles over the sound of their very own wingbeats as they lock onto their unseen prey’s place.

Katherine Gura, a researcher on the Teton Raptor Heart in Wyoming and knowledgeable on Nice Grey Owl ecology, who was not concerned with this acoustics research, was “thrilled” when she learn Clark and Duncan’s paper.

“This work serves as a superb instance of the fascinating questions we will reply by merging a robust information of the bodily properties of snow with wildlife ecology,” she says. “By testing how sound travels by way of the snowscape and linking these findings to Nice Grey Owl foraging methods and morphology, this research begins to unravel how this species advanced its distinctive winter conduct and traits.”

Gura says that Clark and Duncan’s analysis is a vital first step for additional research on whether or not these snow-hunting acoustic diversifications of the Nice Grey Owl can maintain up over time, because the Earth continues to heat—and snowy winters soften away.

“This work opens the door for higher understanding how altering snow regimes probably will have an effect on Nice Grey Owls and different species that depend on subnivean [under the snow] prey,” says Gura. “Their potential to forage—and in the end persist—in a altering world stays unknown.”