Subject: [Tweeters] Fw: New Species of Owl Found
Date: Apr 1 11:20:49 2009
From: Guttman,Burton - GuttmanB at evergreen.edu


Very well done, Michael. I predict a great future for you as a writer of fantasy and science fiction.

Burt Guttman
The Evergreen State College
Olympia, WA 98505 guttmanb at evergreen.edu <mailto:guttmanb at evergreen.edu>
Home: 7334 Holmes Island Road S. E., Olympia, 98503

________________________________

From: tweeters-bounces at mailman2.u.washington.edu on behalf of Michael Hobbs
Sent: Wed 4/1/2009 8:43 AM
To: Tweeters (E-mail)
Subject: [Tweeters] Fw: New Species of Owl Found



>From www.ScienceToday.net:

Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution have discovered a new species of
owl that was, until now, believed only to be a hoax.

The newly described Ollie's Sea Owl (Surnia hunderii) may actually have the
most complex life history of any owl species, according to Nula Moresova, a
research ornithologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural
History. "The more we found out about this species, the more astounded we
became. This bird has, not just one, but several truly unique aspects to its
behavior."

In 1916, a Norwegian fisherman, Olaf Kvifte, brought a specimen of a white
owl to Lars Hunderi, a scientist at the Norwegian Department of Fisheries.
Kvifte claimed to have found the owl on an ice floe in a fjord in
far-northern Norway. When Hunderi presented a paper on the specimen to the
Scandinavian Ornithological Institution in 1917, however, he was met with
scorn and derision. It was believed that the white owl was simply an albino
Northern Hawk Owl, an owl of the boreal region, and that Kvifte's claims
that it had been found on an ice floe were clearly a fabrication. Both
Kvifte and Hunderi died in the 1918 flu epidemic shortly after the
presentation of the paper. The specimen was discarded, and the incident
mostly forgotten.

However, in 2003, during a field expedition to a remote region in the far
north of Norway, Moresova observed a white owl attacking seabirds nesting on
cliffs. She was able to collect that specimen, and subsequent genetic tests
showed that while it was related to the Northern Hawk Owl (Surnia ulula), it
was definitely not of that species. "From the lab work, we knew we had
found something new, but it took us a while to figure out just what," said
Creido Fanfarron, who led the Smithsonian Institution's research project.

A 2004 expedition revealed more details about this owl. Measuring almost 50
centimeters long, with a wingspan of nearly a meter, and weighing about 400
grams, Ollie's Sea Owl is noticeably larger than the Northern Hawk Owl. The
birds seen in Norway were pure white all over, complete with white
feathering hiding the legs and feet. "On the ice, this guy's pretty much
invisible," stated Fanfarron. "We had to use infrared cameras to find
roosting owls, since they blended in with the ice so completely." And just
as Olaf Kvifte had observed in 1916, the owls were nesting exclusively on
ice floes in northern Norwegian fjords.

Most amazing were the feeding techniques that scientists observed. Ollie's
Sea Owls were seen making daring flights at cliff-nesting birds such as
murres and kittiwakes. The startled adults would occasionally dislodge eggs
from the cliffs where they nested, and the sea owls would grab the eggs out
of mid-air before they hit the water. "In all of our observations during
June and early July, the sea owls seemed to eat only eggs snagged out of the
air. It was truly amazing to see them catch eggs without crushing them."

In late-July, at about the time that sea owl eggs were hatching, the murre
and kittiwake eggs were also hatching. The Ollie's Sea Owls no longer had
falling eggs to catch, and had to change their feeding strategy. Using
their incredible speed, they would harass seabirds who were bringing fish
back to their babies. After high speed pursuits that would often last for
minutes, the seabirds would often drop their prey in order to escape the
owls. The owls would then catch the small fish in mid-air. "They were very
adept at catching the sardine-sized prey, sometimes two or three fish in
each talon," reported Moresova.

And in August, when murre chicks were grown, the sea owls found yet another
way to gather food. When a murre chick is ready to leave the nest, its
father will land on the ocean waters below the cliff and call to his single
baby, urging it to jump. The still-flightless chick will then fall, often 40
meters or more, to join it's father in the sea. Or that's what is supposed
to happen. Repeatedly, however, Fanfarron and his team witnessed sea owls
grabbing the baby murres in mid-leap.

The scientists delayed publication of the discovery of Ollie's Sea Owl
because they wanted to know how the owls survived the other nine months of
the year when there weren't seabirds around to terrorize. So in August,
2005, Fanfarron's team put radio transmitters on four owls, two adults and
two juveniles, and then tracked their movements. They were puzzled to find
that, once the sea owl babies had fledged, the owls dispersed from their
nesting floes and began extensive flights around grass-covered islands and
along the tops of cliffs. "For the longest time, we couldn't figure out
what they were doing. They'd fly for miles, never stopping to eat."

Then, in a scene stranger than anything scientists could ever have imagined,
the owls were observed eating yet another airborne prey. On August 29,
2005, Fanfarron and Moresova, tracking two sea owls in an ultralight
aircraft, observed the owls frantically grabbing small critters falling off
a cliff. "It took us a while to figure out what we were seeing. The owls
were grabbing lemmings that were jumping off the cliffs!" Lemmings, small
rodents, are know to disperse when overpopulated by leaping from cliffs and
swimming to new habitats. The owls were not even landing to eat, but were
gorging themselves in-flight on the heads of the lemmings, discarding the
bodies. In 45 minutes, each owl consumed the heads of more than 25
lemmings.

In yet another stunning development, the day after stuffing themselves with
lemmings, the owls set off flying south-southwest across the open ocean.
After about twenty days and nights of non-stop flight, the owls arrived at
the Sargasso Sea, an oceanic gyre or whirlpool within the Bermuda Triangle,
a distance of nearly 6500 kilometers. Further study is needed. "We think
they might be catching and eating storm-petrels during their migration to
sustain them during the long flight," Fanfarron speculated.

When Fanfarron and his team caught up with the owls, they were surprised to
find them entirely changed. No longer pure white, the owls had apparently
molted during or immediately after their transoceanic flight, replacing
their white feathers with a new coat of drab slate-gray and brown feathers.
Furthermore, the owls, which had bred in the never-ending sunlight of the
arctic summer, were completely nocturnal in their new home.

By day, they would roost on floating debris caught in the gyre. It took
Fanfarron's team another couple of years of study to discover how the sea
owls foraged in the near-tropical oceanic waters of the Sargasso. Eventually
they were able to show that the sea owls survived by catching leaping flying
fish. Phosphorescence on the fish allows the owls to see their prey. "At
night, the flying fish would look like glowing darts popping out of the
water. The owls would use their excellent vision and rapid flight to catch
the fish in mid-air," noted Moresova.

Ollie's Sea Owl is unique in many respects. "This is the only owl that
hunts at sea, the only one that eats so many different kinds of prey - bird
eggs, birds, mammals, and fish - on a regular basis, and to catch all of
them in the air, and the only owl to undergo a complete color change
seasonally," explained Moresova. The team is uncertain of the population
size of this owl, but their initial estimates are as low as 100-200 breeding
pairs. That would make Ollie's Sea Owl one of the rarest owls in the world
as well.

Fanfarron became aware of the early twentieth century claims of a hoax
regarding a white ice-nesting owl. Exhaustive research failed to turn up a
single copy of Lars Hunderi's 1917 paper. However, they were able to find
many letters and notes related to the supposed hoax. Despite the absence of
both the original paper and the original specimen, Fanfarron is confident
that Hunderi deserves the credit for originally describing this owl:
"Without the paper, we have no way to discover what Lars had named his owl.
So that task fell to us, and we decided to honor Hunderi in the scientific
name of this new species. We also wanted to honor Olaf Kvifte, the original
discoverer of the bird, and thus we gave the species the common name of
Ollie's Sea Owl. We thought of naming it Kvifte's Sea Owl, but none of us
could pronounce his last name."

These findings will be published in the international science journal
Avitaxa, on April 1, 2009.

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