PART 1

This passage is about owls.

In ancient Greece, the owl was the symbol of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. We rarely see owls because they are nocturnal animals: they hunt at night and rest during the day. In the past, on the rare occasions that someone saw an owl, they thought it was a sign that an important event was going to happen, so people connected owls with intelligence. Owls can fly silently, and this, along with their distinctive haunting sounds, made people fear them. Also, a lot of people used to associate owls with spiritual darkness and considered them bad.

Generally, owls share a similar body shape and have long wings, a short tail, and a broad, flat face with a hawk-like beak and extremely large eyes. The eyes are in a fixed position, but owls can turn their head far enough around to see directly backwards. Despite their preference for hunting at night, they can adjust their eyes so that they are not blinded by sunlight. Indeed, they have better daytime vision than humans do.

Their hearing, too, is exceptionally good, and they can locate and capture prey in complete darkness simply by listening to where it is, though they do a lot of their hunting at dusk and dawn when it is not completely dark. Owls swallow their prey whole. However, the parts of the animal that they can’t digest, like fur and bones, are brought back up to their mouth in small hard balls which the owl then spits out.

The fact that owls prefer to remain hidden during the day gives them an advantage over many other animals: they survive better than other birds near human populations because they avoid the attention of hunters.