Owl swimming in Lake Michigan, caught on camera

kalkion.com

11 points·arnieswap··6 comments

This is really neat, but I'm not really getting why it's here. Owls are known to swim from time to time, particularly when they are injured. This isn't unobserved behavior or anything.

I think this is interesting (ok, not very interesting, slightly interesting). Where I live I never had seen an owl swimming. For me it's interesting because they don't swim like ducks.

Nevertheless I think that it's better to submit the original video than an empty blog post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvrAGHGJIpE

From these related photos, the owl was knocked into the water by a pair of Peregrine falcons:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/happy_peasant/sets/72157649483...

The waterlogged owl paddled its way to shore, where it could dry off and fly away.

There's a really interesting German comment there:

> Frage ich mich, WER hier die Nachteule ist.

"I wonder WHO is the owl here."

So it seems that in German, owls make the sound "WER", rather than "Hoo", but wer also means who in German. Allowing the same joke to work in German as in English.

On the other hand, I can't find a reference to Wer being an owl sound, rather Owls say hoe-hoe in German. This suggests the possibility that the German comments are not actually by a German speaker, but an English speaker pretending to be German and using Google translate as part of the scheme.

Interesting enough but not really appropriate for HN...

That is more of a butterfly stroke than a breast stroke.

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