Comment on Can someone fact check this
Coskii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
I’ll take a stab at it.
There are no known owl species that naturally grow up to 16 pounds. The rest of the numbers are just as meaningless.
If you wanted to check what it would take for a random owl species to migrate across the ocean from europe to north america, that’s something we can kind of check.
After a bit of lookup, it seems that the burrowing owl needs about 50 calories a day at rest to live, flight multiplies those calories by a factor of roughly 9.2 times. (I’mma round up to 10 because fuck it.) So 500 a day of pure flight at a speed of somewhere between 2 and 33 mph. I’m going to settle at 20 because I like easy numbers and I feel like it’s not too crazy fast. So 20 miles per hour across 24 hours gets us a distance of 480 miles. Iceland and Scotland are 500 miles away. Assuming any of these assumptions are at all fair, it seems like an owl hellbent on crossing the ocean could manage to do it with laser guidance in less than two days.
So 20 miles per hour across 24 hours gets us a distance of 480 miles.
Going from Europe to the Americas by way of Scotland and Iceland is going to be a bit of a problem for that bird, as it can expect pretty consistent 10-20kt headwinds for the entire journey. America to Europe by that route is a comparatively easy trip.
I doubt that owls are capable of effective dynamic soaring, but that would drastically reduce the energy requirements.
ethaver@kbin.earth 8 hours ago
Yeah 16 pounds is a large cat like a Maine Coon cat or a small corgi / beagle. There are flighted birds that big but they're not common.