Owls in Towels
owlsintowels.orgThis is a delight!
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!
I've stopped using the word "cheap" to describe situations like this as the word has too many negative connotations. I tend towards "inexpensive", "cost-effective", or "low-cost". I find it better describes my intent to describe something as not costing much but not speaking to poor quality which I feel like the word "cheap" has come to imply.
Theres a phrase in the UK that is "Cheap and cheerful" which I think is perfectly apt for this
I think "cheap" sounds worse in American.
I would say "low-cost, high-impact" when that makes more sense.
In this case it's more like low-cost high-delight which does sound a bit better than "cheap thrills" ;)
The owls do seem to convey a sense of communal grumpiness, expressed individually :)
Not unlike HN at tines . . .
Frugal?
This is a beautiful demonstration of how technology can be simple and powerful for amplifying a message at the same time -- no matter the silliness or seriousness of the message. Very "Old Web" vibes.
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.
> Very "Old Web" vibes.
*Owl Web
Owl Rights Reserved (at the footer)
at the hooter?
Dovetails nicely with the Superb Owl enthusiasts.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22superb+owl%22&ia=images&iax=ima...
Yup, all it takes is a single typo seen by somebody who is not very familiar with American football, and wants to find out more about the teams playing in that year's Superb owl . . .
> cheap site (and I mean that in a good way!)
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.
English already has a lot of words for both meanings. It's more that American culture has designated anything low cost as being of poorer quality.
We have words for "cheap" that don't carry the pejorative meaning.
"Affordable" is the most frequent replacement. There's also "inexpensive".
Affordable can be as euphemistic as it isn't pejorative though.
Has that changed over time? Nearly fifty years ago, when self-serve gasoline pumping at gas stations was first coming into widespread use, I (native English speaker) was in Germany and remember a slogan I saw at gas stations to promote it: "selbst tanken ist billiger tanken" (sorry if I misspelled/mis-capitalized). So it seems Billig did not have such a negative connotation then.
That's something I've done a few times! Mostly from having lived in a wildlife shelter (LPO Ile Grande) for 2 months, since they have quarters for volunteers who wish to stay. Out of all the birds that collide and are unable to fly, you'd be surprised at how many recover, and I mean it's not as grim as some people make it out to be.
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!
One brand of American dish soap, Dawn, has a duckling as a mascot, and has for some years advertised its grease-cutting capability (and gentleness on living things) by showing that it is used to clean oil off waterfowl who have been caught in a slick.
One brand of UK dish soap, Fairy Liquid, bears the label "H412 - Harmful to aquatic life with long lasting effects"
https://www.newhall.co.uk/media/7440_msds.pdf
The H412 comes from sodium laureth sulfate (SLES) which is contained (in large amounts, like 20 to 70% by weight) in practically every kind of liquid soapy detergent, shampoo, liquid hand soap and what not. The only reason you know of that one product is that they seem to sell to professionals as well, which is why they need a material safety data sheet. Your shampoo doesn't need that, so you just don't know that it is just as harmful.
Edit: Dawn seems to contain it as well, look for CAS# 68585-34-2: https://msdsdigital.com/system/files/Dawn_Professional_Dish_... The missing H- and S-numbers in that datasheet come from the differing standards and maybe the different concentrations.
It's in all sorts of crap, not just soap. Hand lotion, toothpaste, etc. I'm unlucky enough to be allergic to it, my skin blisters & peels off after touching even rather small quantities. Finding safe cleaning & hygiene products (especially toothpaste) was difficult, but thankfully there are some brands that started producing sulfate-free products for the new-age free-range organic everything crowd, so it's been getting easier.
ACS's Chemical of the Week for October 24, 2017.
https://www.acs.org/molecule-of-the-week/archive/s/sodium-la...
So use solid soap / shampoo for outdoors (check usability first, naturally).
Solid soap isn't any better. All of those work by making fats water-soluble. This destroys mucous membranes and skin slime layer of fish and other animals and breaks down lipid barriers of algae and bacteria.
The real takeaway is that concentration matters a lot: one person washing up for the morning won't kill a pond, but a hundred people or prolonged exposition will.
That's just to emphasise the fact that you don't use fairy liquid to clean ducks. You use it to clean fairies.
Likewise toilet duck toilet cleaner is just a brand name. You use it for cleaning duck toilets not ducks themselves. And don't get me started on duck tape. One honest mistake and it's a lifetime ban from the RSPB.
Yes; don’t wash your pet halibut with it. Don’t think it should be dangerous to birds, tho.
Fairy dish soap is the European version of Dawn. I'd be surprised if the formulation were significantly different.
Isn't its effectiveness because it's partially oil-based?
Years ago we found a large heron with a broken wing on the road outside our house in Wales. It had probably hit a power cable, and was hopping around dragging its wing. It was basically a homicidal needle beak, obviously not in the best of moods.
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!
What's a bird drying station? (It conjures up a vision of a 60's blow dry salon...)
Modular cages through which air could flow freely, with heater fans pointed at them at the right temperature. After being exposed to soap, birds lose their vital layer of insulation (until they're dried) so you have to artificially maintain their body temperature.
I love this. The web used to be a place filled to the brim with people making sites about stuff dedicated to some niche thing that brought them joy. Glad to see that vibe still survives out there.
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.
Is it connected with an organization? I don't see any evidence of that in the About page or anywhere else. The donations page says to find a local wildlife sanctuary and donate to that, then links out to two options if you really can't find one of your own. But I see no evidence that it's associated with either one of those entities it links to.
Good catch! I saw the “donate” link and assumed whoever made the site was using it for funding. All the better!
I've had to do this several times, it's really the best way to handle birds and bats that get into your home -- just toss the towel on top of it and pick it up. Another trick if a bird flies into your window and stuns itself, you can pick it up with a towel and place it in a (closed) cardboard box outside in the shade so they can recover without a ton of sensory input/stressors, you just have to make sure predators don't get into it.
(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)
As a PSA: if you’re in North America, do not handle bats. They are the primary rabies vector and due to their tiny sharp teeth, it is possible to be bitten unknowingly. Rabies is (almost) 100% fatal once you have symptoms. Leave it to the professionals who are vaccinated and know how to handle them safely. In the US, local animal control can usually help.
The consistency in the quality and sharpness of the photos isn't lost on me. There's obviously lots of curation in this collections, must be some work!
It's like a cat in a purrito.
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...
As delightful as the home page is, the FAQ page is endearingly whimsical: https://owlsintowels.org/about/
This is the kind of project that always used to be its own website, but these days largely exists only on a social media platform where it's stuffed between other content and the usual barrage of ads.
Which is a roundabout way of saying: I love that this is a website.
Especially when you consider that places like Facebook or Linkedin are not even a website any more, once their web address takes you nowhere and they are useless without "signing in".
Such amazing animals. Everytime I see one I am so thrilled. Saw a snowy owl this winter and they are so gorgeous. Also really weird how easy it is to anthropomorphize an owl. They generally look very surprised or very angry. Love it.
Going to this page:
https://owlsintowels.org/gallery/
Finishes with:
"That's owl the posts"
Yes, this is the internet/web I needed today.
"Owl rights reserved"
Do you think this kind of internet nuggets will still exist in our soon to be post-AI world ? We won't be able to know who sent a real vs. a fake picture
I guess we will have to rely on extra-net signals: Meta clues from the real world.
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.
Good clues, but what about verifying the authenticity of pictures people send you ? The author here is gathering pictures from others
It'll always be on case by case basis. My mother sending me an awe-inducing picture on WhatsApp? Yeah she probably found it on Facebook, and it's likely it's fake.
In this website's case, I trust the author did enough due diligence to ensure to the best of his abilities that no AI pictures end up on his site. Looking at the submission page (0) he takes submissions by email, and requests the "name of the wildlife sanctuary and the photographer (if known)" which signals he isn't just putting random pictures from the internet.
Text forgeties existed wver since words were written down, and Text has existed for millennia. We had to deal with possible lies and forgeries the entire time.
Photo and Video are very recent inventions, so it was about time they got the same forgery treatment. Now we will have to rely on the same signals of trust as we had before.
Honestly my first reaction to seeing these photos was to wonder if they were AI-generated (I'm not suggesting they are, I just have that response quite often now).
Exact same, my first reaction to the photos were to think they are AI-generated (which amazingly, they aren't).
I actually didn't think that at all, maybe because the opening text was so straight forward, earnest, and pragmatic?
Appearances can be deceiving :\
That in itself is something that AI can leverage, maybe not better-than-average, but way more often, so people have to be on their toes a lot more too. Whether it's images or not.
Interestingly, with images like this they are highly curated for cuteness, clarity, and composition. If nothing else because there are so many photos taken of each owl during the rescue process, across a large number of photo opportunities. So there is often quite a huge variety of material from which to choose one outstanding example for each owl.
This would then make an optimized training set if you wanted to generate realistic facsimiles digitally later on.
When you do the math though, "who" needs a digital facsimile when the vast majority of actual real-world material is far in excess and not being used at all?
PSA: Many (I mean many) bird injuries are from window strikes, including in this adorable list. These are often fatal even if the bird appears to fly away. My partner is a bird biologist and does work specifically on this area. Unfortunately, fancy modern glass buildings (including that which is in style at universities and other techy campusus) are brutal for this, because the birds can see through the building and think they can also go through. This is not minor, it is actually an existential threat to some species in some urban areas.
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/
I expected something Semantic Web-related. https://www.w3.org/OWL/
I wonder how a mouse would feel about this website.
Mice don’t use the internet, too many cats.
It reminds me of how people make a "purrito" by wrapping a cat in a towel or small blanket in order to safely handle the cat (administer pills, injections, etc.).
And since owls are pretty much just the bird versions of cats, it's fitting.
Reminds me of this classic.
How to Give A Cat a Pill: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC372253/
Indeed. Cats and owls are a fantastic example of convergent evolution: two species on pretty far vertebrates branches that occupy a similar niche (ambush night predators, small preys) and end up with the same physical appearance- colors, head and eyes shape, even the outer ears shape!
In Chinese, owls are called 「貓頭鷹」, which literally means "a hawk with a cat’s head".
I'm not seeing the link on this page, but I believe this popular fediverse account[0] is run by the same folks
Yup. It's linked from https://owlsintowels.org/about/ (search for "More ways to get yer fix").
Such cute owls! Do they need to be wrapped in a towel because it gives them a sense of security? Just like babies, they sleep better when wrapped up tightly. Rescuing small animals is such a meaningful thing to do.
Burritoing a bird is a safe and relatively easy way to restrain it while handling it. It can't flap its wings to fly away, it can't claw you with its talons, and it is far less likely to hurt itself resisting. And yes, they do appear to be more calm, or at least more resigned to the situation.
This is why I love internet. I've never knew I needed this. Thanks :)
The sober spiritual successor to https://www.tumblr.com/hungoverowls I assume
> A+ FACILITIES WOULD STAY AGAIN
Ok ok, you got me! Delightful!
One mentioned glue traps. What’s that and why is it used? Sounds like a horrible way to catch birds.
One mentioned glue traps. What’s that and why is it used?
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.
add this to your <SHELL>rc for the best experience https://paste.sr.ht/~rcastellotti/6fd79ed622e1c426be35f3f038...
It’s cool but I’m wondering why isn’t this an Instagram page or something. I’d follow this.
IG: https://www.instagram.com/owls_in_towels other options on the about page.
Also on mastodon:
This is such a missed opportunity to name the site "BurritOwls" !
Owls are actually hooting outside my door as I pull this up at 12:30 a.m.
You should have waited 4 more minutes to post this.
Three days later, I finally get this.
poundIAmBright
If only owls in towels needed something to bite on, like dowels.
They could perch on the dowels once dry...
No, they perch on trowels.
You're thinking of fowls.
I wonder what's next... owls with runny bowels?
As they say in Texas, that'd be "slicker'n owl shit".
Although in this case it's technically neck-and-neck :)
Question - what is the lowest cost way to do something like this? Imagine one was prepared to go in whatever direction, regardless of difficulty. Can the pros weigh in here?
Now do Hawks in Socks!
(Nylon stockings are commonly used when transporting a wild bird for an hour or two).
I went to a presentation on the reintroduction of the bald eagle to New York state. When handling young eagles, the presenter (then much younger) found the best way to immobilize them was stuff them into the leg of her pants (not when she was wearing the pants, mind you.)
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...
The Cooper's hawk is known to falconers and rehabbers as fitting perfectly inside a (clean) Pringles can. ;)
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.
I stand corrected, or at least clarified!
Back in the day of this eagle effort, some four decades ago, she had to track them by eye in the swamps of Montezuma Wildlife Refuge and wade out to retrieve them. Not fun, but hey that's what grad students are for.
Her book: https://www.amazon.com/Return-Sky-Surprising-Eaglets-Restore...
The last effort to reintroduce bald eagles in the US was wound down in Tennessee in 2003. Today they're everywhere and are off the endangered species list. I see them quite often when out birding in the Finger Lakes of New York.
I was driving from Albany to Binghamton last week and spotted my first BE in the wild over 88. Fully mature, bright white head and tail. I'm into hawks and falcons and don't go out of my way to look for BEs, so it was lucky, and pretty neat.
In the Bay Area where I normally live we've had bald eagles nesting in at least 2 locations -- Crystal Springs reservoir, and next to a middle school in Milpitas, which is rather surprising considering how suburban Milpitas is.
Cute! But they should add a feature so you can use the images via an API, similar to PlaceKitten (which seems to be defunct now).
Unexpected hahah so cute
The footer lol
> 2022-2025 Owl Rights Reserved
this site is a hoot
They seem surprised
Love it.
cute
This is making my day. Gracias, OP. Muchas gracias.
“Would you like a moist owlette?”