What does an owl look like?
The feathers around the owl's eyes are radial, and the fine feathers are arranged to form a face plate, which looks like a cat, so it is named owl. Its feathers are mostly brown, scattered with fine spots, thick and soft, and silent when flying.
Female owls are usually bigger than males. The head is large and wide, the mouth is short, the side is flat and firm, the top is hooked, there is no wax film at the base of the mouth, and it is mostly covered by hard feathers.
Like many carnivores, owls have eyes in front of their faces, which makes them have excellent depth perception during hunting, especially in dim light. The big eyes are fixed in the owl's eye socket and can't turn at all, so the owl has to keep turning its head.
They also have flexible necks so that their faces can turn back. Due to the special cervical structure, the range of motion of their heads is 270. The left and right ears are asymmetrical, the left ear canal is obviously wider than the right ear canal, and the eardrum of the left ear is developed. Most of them also have clusters of ear feathers, forming auricles similar to humans. The auditory nerve is well developed.
It is difficult to study the origin of owl names accurately;
After cats were introduced into China, they did not become popular among the people. It is generally believed that domestic cats were generally domesticated in China only in the prosperous Tang Dynasty.
The common name of owl must be that after the popularity of cats, people will describe owls in the form of cats. In the Song Dynasty, owls were only described as owls or owls, and cats were called civet cats instead of cats at that time, which showed to some extent that the name of owls was not secularized at that time.
Because the owl is a common name, and it is difficult to verify the first source of the common name, it can only be said that the naming of the owl may be later than the Song Dynasty.
Baidu encyclopedia-owl