True, this one looks like someone playing with the color sliders.
I'm sure it tricks all types of people. I've had plenty of coworkers that come up here from the city get freaked out by all kinds of everyday animals like they were encountering aliens.
If they passed them off as "art" I wouldn't care, but they have captions like "nice photo" or "amazing shot!" I don't like them mixing fact and fiction.
This could be a real Striped Owl, but it's on one if these weird group pages. The owl looks real-ish, maybe some processing done to it, the background is blurry and it's cropped tight, so it's hard for me to get context.
Here's a real one:
Only sources Lens turns out for the questionable image are Reddit and Pinterest, so that makes me feel it's fake. The real image comes from Cornell, so it's as real as it gets.
I'm not good on knowing how real light and shadow would work, so I wasn't sure if this was a fake image or some craft project. I see weird creature creations fairly often too.
It's so non-owl like to me except the face, yet it's enough to suggest "owl" moreso than a chicken. The forward facing eyes are what makes me register it as a bird of prey, and the floof shape says owl instead of a hawk or eagle.
Otherwise everything is just so off on this guy. Wrong color, wrong beak, looks like wrong feet, wrong wing feathers.