Superbowl

It turns out I had an incomplete answer for you. The good news is now I have a better answer for you, and I also know a new bit of anatomy!

First I found this: (I left in some extra facts because they are good facts, but the tapetum lucidum turns out to be the specific thing we're after!)

Owls' enormous eyes help them take in enough light to see, even after the sun sets. Owl eyes make up as much as 5 percent of these birds' total body weight. That may not sound like a lot, but for comparison, your eyeballs are about 0.0003 percent of your total weight.

Like us, owls have two different types of light-sensitive cells in their retinas — rods (which detect light and movement) and cones (which distinguish color). Humans have about 20 rods for every cone, but in owls that ratio is more like 30 to one, making them exceptionally good at picking up movement even when it's dark.

If you've ever been out at night and seen owl eyes shining back from your flashlight beam, you no doubt noticed their reflective power, which is yet another way that owls enhance their night vision.

Behind an owl eye's rod-packed retina is another layer called the tapetum lucidum, which catches any light that may have passed through the retina and bounces it back to those sensitive rods. All of these adaptations add up: Some owl eyes may be as much as 100 times more sensitive in low light than ours. The one downside is that owls tend to be farsighted and experience difficulty focusing on objects at close range, but sensitive bristles around their beaks make up for this a bit, giving them another way to sense objects close to their faces.

Armed with that new word, I checked out to see if kitties have that same body part:

How Does It Work?

When light enters a cat’s eye, it can take a few routes. Some of the light directly hits the retina, a layer at the back of the eyeball containing cells that are sensitive to light. These photoreceptor cells trigger nerve impulses that pass via the optic nerve to the brain, where a visual image is formed.

Some of the light passes through or around the retina and hits the tapetum lucidum. The tapetum lucidum reflects visible light back through the retina, increasing the light available to the photoreceptors. This allows cats to see better in the dark than humans.

In the last route, some of the light that bounces off the tapetum lucidum, misses the retina, and bounces back out of the cat’s eyes. This reflected light, or eyeshine, is what we see when a cat’s eyes appear to be glowing.

Do Humans Have a Tapetum Lucidum?

Though our eyes have much in common with cats’ eyes, humans do not have this tapetum lucidum layer. If you shine a flashlight in a person’s eyes at night, you don’t see any sort of reflection.

The flash on a camera is bright enough, however, to cause a reflection off of the retina itself. This is the infamous “red-eye” in photographs. What you see is the red color from the blood vessels nourishing the eye.

So that seems to tie all those stray facts together a bit more. Owls and cats can also get the same "red eye" as we get, but they also can get that yellow-green reflection depending on the angle the light is being sent/received.

The one around here makes a noise like this one right at the start of the video. It's pretty loud. It's not the screechiest sound I've heard. But then again, saw whets don't really sound like a saw to me.