Who’s Hoo?

It was a cool winter's afternoon, and our mission was to explore the roads less taken in the eastern part of our concession, hoping to come across tracks of the Shish Pride who had been MIA for the last week. We knew their last tracks headed towards the Lebombo Mountains, but an unexpected rain shower had dissolved all their tracks since then. What’s worse all the soil had gone from a fine dusty layer to an almost cement like texture, making it challenging to see when even an animal as heavy as an elephant has walked along it, let alone a lion with soft fur between her toes. But you never stop looking, as there is always some magic to be seen out…

Heading north on Sisal Line, a road named after the attempt to grow sisal plants as a natural boundary between South Africa and Mozambique, Sunday suddenly put up his hand and looked left. I tried to stop as smoothly, and as quickly as I could because I had seen what Sunday had spotted. Somehow, despite the speed I was driving at and how dense the vegetation was, Sunday had managed to locate a pair of southern white-faced owls roosting in a small knobthorn tree. I successfully stopped next to this tree, and the two small owls peered down at us over their feather faces.

These owls are famous for their remarkable ability to change their appearance. When they are startled, they can stretch their bodies and tighten their feathers, becoming taller and thinner to blend in with branches. Simultaneously, they narrow their bright eyes into slits and raise their “ear” tufts, reducing the visibility of their faces. To give the impression of being larger and more intimidating, they extend and elevate their wings in a broad semicircle around their bodies and puff up their feathers to enhance their apparent size.

Being predominantly nocturnal, these birds are not regularly encountered and so have an air of mystery around them. The local Shangaan/Tsonga people tend to associate owls with superstition and many African folktales see them as witches or bringers of evil. Some tribes use spikes on the roofs of their houses to deter owls from landing on them as it is seen as a negative omen. For other cultures the owl is sacred and often viewed as a symbol of wisdom. Many people believe that seeing an owl is a profoundly good thing, as it indicates the start of a new phase in life. And for those who are less superstitious, owls are just as fascinating due to their many adaptations for hunting under the cover of darkness.

Hunting at night means that owls need to be able see under very low-light conditions. To aid this their eyeballs are comparatively much bigger than ours, taking up 75% of their skull vs the 5% ours takes up. They have a higher density of light sensitive cells called rods, and lower density of colour sensing receptors and so are basically colour-blind. Their eyeballs are so big and lack the ocular muscles to move the eyeballs and therefore are always looking forward. Their incredibly flexible necks allow them to turn 270 degrees left or right to see what is happening around them.

All species of owl have a facial disk. This stiff ring of feathers around the face acts like a large outer ear, while asymmetrical ear openings pinpoint the exact source of a sound with deadly accuracy.

In order to minimise the noise made while flying, they have tiny fringe feathers which look similar to eyelashes. They are found on the leading edge of an owl’s wing to disrupt the air moving over and under the wing making them inaudible for even the most sensitive microphones to hear, as was demonstrated in one experiment by BBC sound engineers.

When they do vocalise however, owls make some of the most unique sounds. The deep grunting of the Verreuax’s eagle owl and the repetitive almost insect like chirp of the African scops owl is a distinctive sound of the lowveld at night.

Story and photos by Monika Malewski