Owl

The owl's reputation is split almost exactly in half along a geographic line, and the wisdom half is narrower than most people assume.

Greece. The little owl, Athene noctua, was the bird of Athena, and Athens stamped it on the reverse of the silver tetradrachm alongside the goddess's head, one of the most widely circulated coins of the ancient Mediterranean, known simply as an owl in the trade of the period. The proverb about carrying owls to Athens is a classical joke about pointless surplus, and it works because the coins were everywhere. Whether the association began with wisdom is doubtful; the little owl was simply common on the Acropolis, and the wisdom reading follows from the goddess rather than leading to her.

Rome. Roman writers took a much darker view. The strix was a bird of ill omen and, in some accounts, a creature that fed on infants, the word is the ancestor of the Italian strega, witch. Pliny records that an owl in the city required expiatory rites. The hoot foretold death.

Elsewhere. Association with death and with witchcraft is very widespread. In several Mesoamerican traditions the owl is a messenger of the underworld; in a range of African traditions it is linked to sorcery; and among the Dine, to take one carefully specified example, an owl's call is a serious matter and the bird is associated with death and with witchcraft. This is not a colourful detail to be repeated for effect. It means that presenting the owl as a universal emblem of wisdom misrepresents a great many traditions, including living ones.

The single English association of owls with wisdom is medieval and Aesopic, reinforced by Winnie-the-Pooh's Owl and by a century of children's illustration.

The owl's abilities are unusual enough that the symbolism required almost no invention.

Hearing. In several owl species, including the barn owl, the ear openings are set at different heights on the skull, so a sound arrives at each ear at a slightly different time and intensity in the vertical as well as the horizontal plane. The facial disc works as a parabolic collector, funnelling sound to the ears. The result is that a barn owl can locate and strike prey in total darkness by sound alone, which has been demonstrated in controlled experiments in which no light was available at all. Very few vertebrates can do this.

Silence. The leading edge of the flight feathers carries a comb-like fringe, the trailing edge is soft, and the upper surface is velvety. Together these break up the turbulence that produces the sound of a wingbeat, and shift what remains into frequencies above the hearing of most prey. The owl hears the mouse and the mouse does not hear the owl. The effect has been studied for aircraft and turbine noise reduction.

Eyes and neck. Owl eyes are tubular rather than spherical and cannot rotate in the socket, which is why the head has to move instead. Fourteen cervical vertebrae, twice the mammalian number, and an arterial arrangement that keeps blood flowing under extreme rotation allow about 270 degrees of turn. The bird is not turning its head all the way round, a claim made surprisingly often; it turns three-quarters of a circle in either direction from centre.

The forward-facing eyes and flat face give the owl a more human-looking gaze than almost any other bird, and that, more than any capacity for thought, is likely why people have read intelligence into it.