The View from Sapsucker Woods

A startling news item this spring caught many by surprise, and graphic footage of the event is still being discussed and debated. Some wondered if the video should be aired at all, while others continue to study it on a popular web site. On the tape—which first aired as live video on April 18, 2006—a mother can be seen first cuddling, then gently nudging her infant back and forth on the floor, but the tiny baby does not seem to be responding. The mother continues her gentle administrations for a minute longer, then picks up the limp baby and turns almost as if to display it to the camera. Gradually, her actions change. With the baby on the floor again, she picks at its head—first gently, then more forcefully. Suddenly, she pulls the baby's head completely off and swallows it whole! A few seconds later, she swallows the remaining corpse of her dead infant, and begins to clean herself after the small meal.

Illustration by John W. Fitzpatrick/CLO

Context is everything. I find this six-minute video clip of Barn Owl behavior among the most riveting I've ever seen, and its lessons are manifold. The video clip was recorded by The Birdhouse Network's Nest Box Cam , which had been streaming live video over the Internet since March. In the nest box 50 miles south of Dallas, Texas, the tiny owlet had hatched on April 17 in the midst of a horrific heat spell. Outside temperatures exceeded 100 degrees F, and the female's drooped wings and gular fluttering revealed intense heat inside the box. Prolonged drought and depleted food supplies led to an unusually small clutch of just three eggs this year (compared with six last year). Too young to regulate its own body temperature, the owlet was doomed by the heat. Facing a food shortage of her own, and with two still-living eggs to tend, the adult female exhibited her natural, predatory response to a freshly dead carcass.

Many sympathetic viewers of the video recognized this act of "cannibalism" simply as an opportunity to reprocess protein and fluids she had already invested once and could use again. Indeed, although the word "cannibalism" carries a terrible stigma to humans, value judgments are utterly inappropriate for acts of efficiency and alimentation in nature. As it happens, the female and her two remaining eggs successfully endured the heat spell. To the delight of countless human viewers, the two survivors hatched, grew older and bolder, and on June 22 took their first flight outside the box. These young owls will neither know nor care that a third, less fortunate sib—the first egg laid and thus the first to hatch—helped their mother survive a parental ordeal before they took their first breath.

Live coverage of Barn Owls, bluebirds, and a host of other species facing daily struggles to raise young is expanding our view of the world. Witnessing cycles of life and death, in detail and in real-time, represents yet another educational opportunity afforded by the Internet. Thanks to a recently awarded grant from the National Science Foundation, the Lab's Citizen Science program will be experimenting with this new form of teaching and learning over the coming years. No doubt, Barn Owls will continue to feature among our very best and most alluring teachers.

—John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director

See ?Barn Owl Blogs? for an article about viewers? reactions to the Barn Owl footage.

For permission to reprint all or part of this article, please contact Laura Erickson, editor, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 159 Sapsucker Woods Rd., Ithaca, NY, 14850. Phone: (607) 254-1114. email: lle24@cornell.edu