Owl Capturing Prey
Owls are notoriously stealthy hunters. Here, an Arizona screech owl’s silent flight helped it capture a non-native reptilian snack.
National Geographic writes:
Wildlife biologist Bruce Taubert was studying the eating habits of Arizona’s small desert owls when he got lucky: he found a rare screech owl next. For several nights, he photographed the owls carrying food back to their chicks using an infrared trip beam that triggers a high-speed flash. This owl collected a Mediterranean gecko on its nightly run. “Mediterranean geckos are nonnative in Arizona and their distribution is expanding,” Taubert says. His theory on how they got there? “It may be that the geckos were delivered to [nearby] houses by landscape companies bringing in exoticplants.”
