How Do Owls Turn Their Heads?
It’s impossible to surprise them from behind, as owls turn their heads to limits unthinkable to humans. Clearly, they have something the rest of the animals lack, or they couldn’t turn their face almost completely around without ending their own life.
But why do owls need this ability? How do they do it? Are they the only animals capable of performing this gesture at this level? The answer to these and other questions is in the following lines. Don’t miss it!
Why can owls turn their heads like that?
These nocturnal predators are endowed with an extraordinary sense of hearing and sight to find their prey in the dark. Owls, like other nocturnal animals, cannot see color – at night it’s not necessary – but their binocular vision is excellent.
On the other hand, the eyeballs of owls – and other birds of prey – are tubular in shape to improve their depth vision, so it’s impossible to move them to examine your surroundings. This directly implies that these birds need to turn their necks to look at any point.
Can owls turn their heads 360 degrees?
Although at first glance it doesn’t seem like it, these birds can’t actually turn their heads in a perfect circumference. However, it’s not far from this: owls are capable of turning their heads up to 270 degrees. For comparison purposes, humans only get up to 90 degrees on our own axis.
It is logical to think that it is not possible to rotate the neck so much, as it is an area through which important tubes, such as the trachea, tendons and blood vessels, pass. If this structure is twisted beyond its possibilities, internal hemorrhages, interruption of the air passage to the lungs and even cervical fractures occur, but not in the case of owls.
So how do owls do it?
Owls do not damage your blood vessels or force your tendons to twist your neck, as they are designed to do so. Its entire cervical anatomy allows for extreme twists without causing injury or interrupting the passage of air or blood to the brain.
The owl’s own cervical bony structure was designed for this extreme movement. While humans only have 7 cervical vertebrae, this bird of prey has 14. However, what is really surprising is the design of its circulatory system, as studies show.
The cervical and cephalic arteries run the length of the spine, passing through small holes in each vertebra. In the case of these nocturnal birds of prey, these holes are 10 times larger than in humans. This excess space creates small air pockets that prevent strangulation of the vertebral artery. This allows the brain to continue to be irrigated during torsion.
On the other hand, these nocturnal birds have small interconnections between the carotid and vertebral arteries, which allow the exchange of blood between them. That way, if one pathway is blocked by twisting the neck, the other artery is still able to deliver blood to the brain.
The importance of this fact for human medicine
In conclusion, it cannot be overemphasized how much can be learned from animals. Any doctor who sees a nocturnal bird of prey turn its head in this way will wonder how the forests aren’t full of stroke-dead owls.
Human arteries, which are fragile and thin, have nothing to do with the large arteries of owls and their interconnections. The same goes for our tendons and muscles, which are much less flexible than those of these wonderful birds. All strigiform birds – owls, owls, murucututus and others – have these robust motor and circulatory systems.
What for legends is dark and frightening, for medicine is a source of information that can save lives. What else do these amazing creatures have to show us? Only science and the physiological study of living beings will give us more answers over time.
