Man... this post is SO COOL! Thanks for sharing about your day job.

This is really fascinating work. I'm sure the 4-leggeds and wingeds who have to worry about raptors swooping down to eat them or members of their family are keenly tuned to the presence and habits of birds of prey. When you're prey, you damn well better pay attention! But from my limited, non-prey perspective, the owl and its head movements certainly look realistic. I love that you spent time in the field researching owl behavior to inform your design.

I imagine you are up against the scarecrow phenomenon. As I understand it, birds get habituated to scare crows when they notice they never move. You've addressed that with both the accurate taxidermy and RoboBubo's head movements. It sounds like later models may incorporate other movements.

Does your experimental methodology include ways of detecting when birds have pierced the veil of your illusion? Over time, as we gain some sense of bird linguistics, perhaps we can distinguish "look out everybody, there's an owl on the prowl" from "there's that silly robot again, what do they take us for? Birdbrains?" ;-)