Great Gray Owls hunting voles under snow hover to defeat an acoustic mirage. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 2022; 289 (1987) DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2022.1164 Cite This Page : ...

What is this organism? Where is it found? When am I likely to see it? And, most interesting and most difficult to answer, why ...

The new study, published November 22 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests the owls hover over the snow to locate muffled sounds, and that their broad faces help with this task.

Several of great gray owls' physical features, especially parts of their wings and face, help them correct for sonic distortions caused by snow, enabling them to find hidden, moving food with ...

Often mistaken for mice, voles have high-pitched voices that get lost under snow cover. However, their digging and chewing sounds beam straight onto the owls' facial radar.