Back when I was young, yes there were Pterodactyls, we lived in a lot of blue-collar areas where shift work was prominent. Shift work is work at places where they run shifts, or 8 hours periods of work, and worked around the clock. You had the AM shift, usually 7-3, the PM shift, 3-11, and the night shift, 11-7 in the morning.

Day Sleepers were usually found in blue-collar jobs, like working in the mill, or being a nurse, or being a cop, or a taxi driver, or a shelf stocker down at the A&P. But the majority of the ones we lived near were steel mill workers and guys who worked in the paper mills. Everybody pulled the night shift once in a while. Some guys hated it and counted the seconds until they could return to the daylight, other guys loved it and stayed on the night shift permanently. You could usually tell those guys because they were pale, and squinted a lot when they weren’t working. I say guys all the time because it was rare after WWll to see a woman working the night shift unless she was a nurse. There probably were plenty but we never saw them.

What all these night shift workers had in common was they needed to sleep in the daytime, hence the term Day Sleepers. If they lived at home you could always count on seeing the windows blacked out with heavy curtains or dark shades and you knew not to make noise around their house lest you woke up the sleeping bear. Woe and despair to the door-to-door salesman that didn’t heed the sign saying “Day Sleeper Do Not Disturb”. Remember this was before the days of anger management classes and the cops did not listen with any sympathy to the salesman’s explanation of why his eye was black or his nose was skewed to the left. It was almost always to the left as most of these mill workers were right-handed. These shift workers were normally pretty tough guys, kind of like dock workers, and they always settled things fairly swiftly and that meant the salesman usually had to hobble down to the clinic to get his salesman’s case out.

Even with all the precautions of dark windows, kids playing quietly near their house, signs on the door, it was tough getting enough sleep during the day. It just isn’t natural sleeping when it’s light out. Having pulled a few night shifts myself I can attest to this fact. I was always glad to get off nights and rejoin the living.

 About the only true night shift workers in the animal world are owls. They have been the work at night, sleep during the day, symbols of reversed life styles for as long as we have noticed them. That ‘s why it always feels so strange to see one flying about in the broad daylight. It’s like they must have a serious case of Owl Insomnia. This is a Great Gray Owl (Strix nebulosa), I know Latin this early in the morning, right, and he has seriously turned his behavior around and is awake and active at 11:00am and hunting for all he’s worth. Perhaps he’s on to something. If they see that good at night, that they can catch-all those little rodents who are out scurrying about in the dark, how much better could he see in full daylight. Those field mice are toast. We could be seeing some sort of evolutionary change, owl-wise, happening right now.

He has the look of an ex-Day Sleeper to me. So far I have only seen this behavioral change up in Yellowstone but I intend to watch carefully from now on to see if their behavior might spread to other owl species. If it does I’ll keep you posted.