How do owls achieve noiseless flight?

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How do owls achieve noiseless flight?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

If you’re thinking of that video where they had 3 different birds fly over some microphones, they kind of cheated.

Look where the two “noisy” birds took off from. A platform equal in height to the landing platform.

Look where the owl took off from, a box on top of that same platform. Not exactly… fair.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If I remember correctly it’s something to do with the feather tips. The ends of the feathers act as a silencer and splits the air that passes over them. Also as others have said their wingspan to body mass ratio means they can fly at slower speeds thus reducing the airflow that moves over the wing.

Objects moving through the air at speed create more sound the faster they travel. You can test this with something as simple as a stick. Give it a twirl and you get nothing, thrash it through the air and you get a whooshing sound as it cuts through.

Owls utilise a larger wingspan to reduce their speed and I believe the tips of the feathers are evolved in such a fashion to dissipate the sound further.

Or I’m just full of shite. Either way them lighthouse headed mice munchers be silent and swift like carbon monoxide poisoning in an enclosed space.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The feathers on the edges of their wings are very soft. This makes for an almost complete lack of flapping sound.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Easy– if you were to compare an owl feather to, say, a goose feather, you would see that the owl feathers have fluffy ends, which massively deafen the bird’s flight noise. Alternatively, a goose feather is significantly more rigid, with no fluff at the ends to deafen the flight.

Anonymous 0 Comments

On top of what others have included about large wing spans and serrated feathers. Their feathers are softer/fluffier than other birds which are more sleek and layer tightly over themselves. Where owls get silent flight, they trade out the water resistant quality other feathers tend to have. So a wet owl, or a moist owlet if you will, has incredible difficulty flying.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Owls have disproportionatley large wings for their body size – less flappy flappy more glidey glidey. And their feathers have specially evolved serrations on their edges (google owl feather closeup) that further disturb and smooth the airflow over them reducing turbulence. While I work in aerospace Im not an aerospace engineer, so a proper explanation probably has stuff to do with fluid dynamics and cool terms like boundary separation and vortex shedding, but if I recall its vortexes caused by the wing/feather moving through the air that causes the sound. So if you have physical vanes or serrations that intrude on that and break the big vortexes into smaller ones, it’ll be quieter. Similar to how newer airliner jet engines have those little triangle teeth on the exhaust nacelles, to break up the exhaust airstream for noise abatement.

[And remember, if silence were loudness, owls would be the loudest flying bird. That is how the owl… doooo.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeFxdkaFzRA)

Anonymous 0 Comments

A quick and simple explanation: they have huge wings compared to their body mass, they glide when they can, and are very good at gliding very slowly and thus quietly. In addition they have special structures their feathers that help reduce noise.