Posted by Martin R on September 11, 2009 
On my way to the Library of the Academy of Letters today I spied something unusual. Somebody on the second floor of Storgatan 30 is having pigeon trouble. They’ve studded the window ledge with nails and stuck a plastic owl to the front of the house.
Those owls are pretty popular. My mom once found one washed up on the seashore near her summer house.
Ha future archaeologists will find widespread evidence of an owl cult. The figures are made of plastic, a virtually indestructible material that represents the highest level of technical innovation achieved by the society, and always accorded prominent positions on their structures.
When I was a kid, my parents put up something similar on our balcony to curb the magpies, it worked for about a day.
Several years ago I had jury duty and had to sit in an upper story room in the courthouse for endless hours (no wifi). I could see the roof of an adjacent building where they had installed plastic owls to keep the pigeons away. They had no effect other than occasionally providing a perch for the pigeons.
Finally I was selected for a theft case jury and we turned the rascal loose.
How interesting! Over a decade ago my dad got one made of wood to discourage the woodpeckers from pecking away at his fruit trees. The woodpeckers pecked his wooden owl to pieces, literally. I only saw its pitiful remains, mostly the feet. The woodpeckers were perched on them.
Here in Texas, crows are a problem and the local grocery store tried installing some ersatz owls (of unknown substance) on the rooftop to keep off said crows. The crows perched alongside the ersatz owl and pooed on the owl’s head.
I conclude that an owl that fails to either move around or go “hoo! hoo!” fails to scare his supposed prey. Do Swedish owls say “who” by the way, or do they ask some other question?
Does that mean that place names with Hoo in them (like Sutton Hoo) are just naming different watering holes?
It’s often hard to tell with English. We’ve got words with origins in German, French, Norse, Breton/Cornish, Latin, Greek, Gaelic and goodness knows how many other languages. I thought the Hoo placenames were in areas of Viking influence and hence expected the name to be Norse. Silly me. I should know better than to assume things like that.
September 11, 2009
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