Honestly my first reaction to seeing these photos was to wonder if they were AI-generated (I'm not suggesting they are, I just have that response quite often now).
Exact same, my first reaction to the photos were to think they are AI-generated (which amazingly, they aren't).
I actually didn't think that at all, maybe because the opening text was so straight forward, earnest, and pragmatic?
Appearances can be deceiving :\
That in itself is something that AI can leverage, maybe not better-than-average, but way more often, so people have to be on their toes a lot more too. Whether it's images or not.
Interestingly, with images like this they are highly curated for cuteness, clarity, and composition. If nothing else because there are so many photos taken of each owl during the rescue process, across a large number of photo opportunities. So there is often quite a huge variety of material from which to choose one outstanding example for each owl.
This would then make an optimized training set if you wanted to generate realistic facsimiles digitally later on.
When you do the math though, "who" needs a digital facsimile when the vast majority of actual real-world material is far in excess and not being used at all?