The N.Y. Times has a nifty story on owls today. Here's a sample:

"In the Western imagination, the owl surely vies with the penguin for the position of My Favorite Bird. 'Everyone loves owls,' said David J. Bohaska, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who discovered one of the earliest owl fossils. 'Even mammalogists love owls'

"Owls are a staple of children’s books and cultural kitsch — here wooing pussycats in pea-green boats and delivering mail to the Harry Potter crew, there raising a dubiously Wise eyebrow in the service of snack food.

"Yet for all this apparent familiarity, only lately have scientists begun to understand the birds in any detail, and to puzzle out the subtleties of behavior, biology and sensory prowess that set them apart from all other avian tribes."

The link is here.