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.
