what's up smart people Joe here it's time for the big game you know the one it's the games the guys the feelings past fall you know PBS Sports presents but you heard how there's been one team in the bird league this year that's been dominating the rest we're talking skill agility speed the ability to fly and enormous talent at every position ready to get up in your grill let's meet the team on the ground or in the air these guys are better ok maybe not with an actual football maybe more like a mouse owls need sensory superpowers because they've got to be efficient hunting machine a barn owl could easily have seven owl babies each needing to eat five months a day to get the big eaters in there and since they only hunt at night our stat computers tell us that six hours to gain 35 Mike [Music] to make the most of every play you've got to be able to see the field luckily relative to body size Alice haves gigantic eyes maximum visual sensitivity in low-light owl peepers are so big regular spear shaped eyeballs like ours wouldn't leave any room for bird brain their solution tubular eyes larger eye opening and it keeps your skull small that's a win-win baby but the drawback of tubular eyes means you can't move them in your sockets the luckily owls can go full Exorcist they can rotate their heads around up to 270 degrees now great vision is one skill but these guys are the total package when it's too dark to see they pull a special page from their playbook there owl ears if those aren't actually ears their hope their old faces in ear owl faces may look flat but that's a feathery fake out this is rough facial rough let's take apart this key to the game the rough has two different types of feathers I got your guys in the middle ear to protect the face and eyes and these guys out here on the edge you can move either way they reflect sounds towards a couple a symmetrically placed receiver these guys hit the perfect angle to create super hearing talk about a hoot their face is basically a sound collecting radar dish they're hearing so good they can even hunt mice underneath the snow focus on the sound it's game over now rounding out the total skill package owls evolve silent flight just look at that winged thing when you've got big flappers compared to your body size you can fly slowly and create less noise the front edge of that wing is serrated to dampen that sound it's like velvet baby well the front edge is laying out lead blocking on the passing air the trailing edge has a fringe texture that means less drag all speed you hear that me neither you don't have to be Albert Einstein to see these guys are basically perfect stealth flying machines we've got engineers studying them to figure out how to make quieter planes and drones which is terrifying when they hit figures they swallow their food pretty much whole then what goes down comes back up a few hours later basically a well-preserved pack of undigested bones and fur now that's disgusting but useful they can give you a play-by-play of what species the allottee now when scientists find old preserved owl pellets they can study how small mammal communities changed over thousands of years it's a whole history recorded in our food owls may not have the passing ability of a guy like Tom Brady but when you can see and hear the field like that superb owls are champs stay serious and don't miss our halftime show dead mouse [Music]