In a rare video, snowy owl seen doing butterfly stroke in lake

Rare footage has surfaced on the internet which proves that owls can swim. The clip which was posted by Macomb County Sherrif in the US shows a white owl swimming in a lake. Here is a screengrab from the clip :

Butterfly stroke

In the video which is not unavailable, a snowy owl can be seen doing a butterfly stroke towards the shore of Lake St. Clair which runs between Ontario and Michigan. The video further shows the owl hoping to dry land and flying after it dried its feathers. The nocturnal birds refrain from swimming until they accidentally fall into the water as it strips them of their ability to fly immediately if threatened. 

Scientists in the US have found that the way barn owl brains use sound to locate prey may be a template for navigation devices, according to Indian-origin researchers who are recreating brain circuitry of the birds in electronics."We were already studying this type of circuitry when we stumbled across the Jeffress model of sound localization," said Saptarshi Das, Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University in the US. The Jeffress model, developed by Lloyd Jeffress in 1948, explains how biological hearing systems can register and analyse small differences in the arrival time of sound to the ears and then locate the sound's source. "Owls figure out which direction the sound is coming from to within one to two degrees," said Saptarshi.

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"Humans are not that precise. Owls use this ability for hunting especially because they hunt at night and their eyesight isn't all that good," researchers said. The ability to use sound to locate relies on the distance between the ears, according to the study published in the journal Nature Communications. In barn owls, that distance is quite small, but the brain's circuitry has adapted to be able to discriminate this small difference.If the owl is facing the sound source, then both ears receive the sound simultaneously. If the sound is off to the right, the right ear registers the sound slightly before the left.

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