Monday, October 26, 2009

Birds in the NFL: Seattle Seahawks

What, exactly, is a seahawk? Wikipedia says it might be an osprey, which makes sense because osprey feed primarily on fish, or maybe a skua.

Maybe neither, because the Seahawks logo has a pretty prominent supraorbital ridge. Osprey don't have a supraorbital ridge, which is most unusual for a bird of prey.

But the other option, the skua, looks more like a gull, so we'll just use an osprey and call it good, m'kay?



Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) are very common around Washington waterways. They're beautiful and they have a distinctive call.

This one was doodled, in pen (way more difficult than using a pencil, by the way... no going back), from a photo in Birds of North America.

I feel a special affinity for the Osprey because of a silly promotion for the movie The Golden Compass. The studio that released the film offered a flash-based quiz -- you answer the questions and the application decides which animal is your daemon (basically your soul, separate from you body and embodied by an animal spirit... one of the neat parts of Philip Pullman's story). I took the quiz and my daemon is an osprey named Aeron. (Of course, if I had gone back and tried the quiz again, I'm sure it would have given me a different animal with a different name. I like Aeron.)