This site is a great reminder that almost everyone visiting Hacker News has a set of skills which can be put to beneficial use for causes you care about - this is a small, simple, cheap site (and I mean that in a good way!) that attracts attention, awareness, and donations to something the author cares about. It’s easy for us, but it’s magic for most people. Don’t let your tech industry imposter syndrome fool you - we can do valuable things to forward causes we care about.
Also, it’s adorable!
Anyone who's worked on random enterprise CRUD REST apps earlier in their career (myself included) knows the pain of wishing that you were doing something a little more helpful or positive for humanity.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22superb+owl%22&ia=images&iax=ima...
I guess English needs different words for the German "Günstig" and "Billig". They both translate to cheap, but "Günstig" means something like cost-effective/affordable (but I guess not quite?), and is positive, while "Billig" is strictly negative.
"Affordable" is the most frequent replacement. There's also "inexpensive".
That shelter was especially interesting because it's near the nesting grounds of marine birds that are relatively rare in France or even Europe overall. Cargo ships in the English channel illegally dump oil waste all the time, and the oiled marine birds just float helplessly to the beach, still alive. People pick them up and bring them to the shelter where we literally hand-wash them with soap and put them in a bird drying station. The numbers could get overwhelming and we would have to make "bird washing assembly lines" on occasion.
It's a whole discipline with specialized equipment, passed-down knowledge and passionate people!
An elderly lady come out to see what the fuss was about, saw the bird, went back inside and then reappeared holding a block of polystyrene foam. She marched up to the bird, which very soon after found itself with a lump of foam on the end of its beak. That gave others the opportunity to wrap it in a blanket (bit big for a towel) and take it to the vet.
Those old ladies are tough!
Edit: to be clear, this site is connected with an organization and probably exists to help promote it, but it still gives that “look, this is cool!” passion to me.
(If you ever have to relocate a bat, don't just leave them on the ground, they can't take off from there and will almost certainly die. Put them in a tree or somewhere higher up)
Owls are like the cats of the bird world. It's too bad they don't get to talk. I think they'd have a lot to talk about... night time hunting, the size of mice and other rodentia, hairballs/pellets...
Which is a roundabout way of saying: I love that this is a website.
https://owlsintowels.org/gallery/
Finishes with:
"That's owl the posts"
Yes, this is the internet/web I needed today.
For example, the website creator doesn't seem to be looking for profit, nor did they add much oin terms of personal info that would point to him looking for internet clout.
The FAQ page comes across as genuine and, as another commenter put it, whimsical.
It's also all self hosted, and on a unique domain, while mass-content-farmera prefer prefer the zombified audiences of Tiktok and Facebook.
All those signals combine into a high probability of everything on the site being genuine.
There are some very effective and cheap solutions if you have a window birds are hitting. Wavy lines on the window with a bar of soap work well. Even better are strings hanging in vertical lines outside the window. Believe it or not, your brain gets used to these and you stop noticing them very quickly. They cut down on bird fatalities a TON.
Example: https://www.birdsavers.com/
And since owls are pretty much just the bird versions of cats, it's fitting.
How to Give A Cat a Pill: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC372253/
Ok ok, you got me! Delightful!
Glue traps are used to catch mice and rats. The owl sees its prey struggling in the trap, and tries to eat it.
Many birds of prey die due to eating poisoned rats and mice. Most famously, Flaco, who escaped from the Central Park zoo and entertained New Yorkers for months before eating a poisoned rat.
Although in this case it's technically neck-and-neck :)
(Nylon stockings are commonly used when transporting a wild bird for an hour or two).
She had to constantly do this as they fledged, since they couldn't get back up to the platform where the nest was. In the wild, the parents would continue to feed the young after they left the nest but before they could fly, but that wasn't practical for her to do.
The process of raising raptors from eggs is called "hacking", so it's entirely appropriate for this site. Normally done on hawks, this project showed it would work with eagles too.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack#dictionary-e...
I must correct you on hacking, though. This process starts with just-fledged raptors, already grown to full size, fully feathered, but raised in closed quarters. They are put in a shelter surrounded by plenty of space for flying where they can see the outdoors, and they are fed daily for a few days to acclimate. Then the shelter is opened and they're allowed to explore. Food continues to be provided daily. The day that one of the birds doesn't come back for its daily feeding indicates it has caught something on its own, and is ready to be recaptured and trained as a falconry bird.
This process allows the birds to learn flying and hunting as if they were wild raptors. It reduces certain negative behaviors you get in human-imprinted birds, and gives them "street smarts" i.e. recognizing and avoiding other predators. These days of course we put telemetry tags on them so they're easy to locate and recover.
As metaphor it would be training to deal with the wide wild world, which HN has a bit of too.
> 2022-2025 Owl Rights Reserved
