More than 90,000 cat videos get uploaded daily to YouTube, according to the platform's recent Culture and Trends report and speaking to the over-the-top human interest in the content.
In recent years, cats have even emerged as an audience, with high-definition video of squirrels, hungry birds and chipmunks to keep Mr. Fluff occupied. (Dog-related content, for what it's worth, doesn't garner nearly the views.)
It appears an appetite for video has jumped species in Houston, Minn., where a young burrowing owl named Bea at the International Owl Center is transfixed by YouTube videos playing on a cellphone. She brings hyper-focus to the sounds and movements of birds, rodents and insects onscreen.
The news will trigger smiles in Owl Center followers, but something deep in the raptor's DNA has opened a way to work better with the owl.
Bea, 4½ months old and the size of "a pop can on stilts," is an education bird at the Owl Center that was bred in captivity, said Karla Bloem, the center's executive director. Bea's parents, from Kansas, could not be released back to the wild.
In her young life, Bea has grown accustomed to being handled by, and in the company of, people — it's all she has ever known. And yet the owl is a product of her species, known for preferring open country and grassy pasture to pursue prey and to nest in holes they scratch out themselves with their long legs or hooked beaks, or take over from gophers and other critters.
Burrowing owls are a vulnerable bird in some parts of North America. Their decline broadly has been connected to the impact of agriculture and development on habitat for burrowing wildlife. And it is the only owl species on the state of Minnesota's endangered list; its last official sighting was in 2016, Bloem said.
Like the cats drawn to YouTube, Bea's predatory radar lights up at the sound and movement of ground critters, and also calls from other species. The reaction is what any wild owl would do, Bloem said, a function of evolution.
"For [Bea], it is just hardwired," she added.
Staff leveraged Bea's acute awareness as they crafted ways to comfortably move her from the Owl Center to her home offsite. A plastic carrier with a peephole left her jumpy, perhaps because her vision was limited, Bloem said.
Bea now voluntarily enters a soft-side carrier with mesh windows, drawn to YouTube videos of birds, mice and insects — sometimes even an image of a butterfly on the move — playing on a cellphone planted deep in the carrier. The combination of a carrier with more sight lines and the cellphone video works.
Research papers overflow online with studies around real vs. artificial stimuli and their effect on wildlife behavior. The overall tenor: there is still much to explore. Lori Arent, assistant director at The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, said it is hard to know how a captive bird is interpreting what's playing in a video. Does it know a mouse is a mouse? Part of the allure, it appears, are movements and sounds onscreen, and it's traced to what's inherent in raptors, wild or captive: a base instinct to hunt.
Acknowledging the biological mysteries, Bloem said Bea's experience is unique and the video playback's use doesn't bear some larger explanation about the type of owl or raptors' exceptional sight and hearing.
"What works for each bird as an individual is an exploration and experimentation into what that individual likes," she said.
Added Bloem: "Bea is reacting as if what she is watching is real, but I'm not extracting meaning from it, other than what she may perceive as prey vs. threat vs. something innocuous moving around."
