The owls are not what they seem.

[prillalar]

I've been thinking about owls and owl post in the HP universe. How does the owl post system work?

Are the owls themselves:

• trained
• enchanted
• not actually real owls

I'd go for enchanted myself, because they are really quite amazing. All you have to do to send a letter is tell your owl who you want to send it to. They do the rest.

But how do they know where to go? As if that weren't extraordinary enough, consider this:

Harry could send owl post to Sirius Black when Sirius was on the run. It would reach him regardless of where he was. So, why couldn't the ministry do the same thing? And track the owl? We know that people receive post that they don't want, so it's not like the owls only deliver letters that you want.

Also, Harry was able to send Hedwig with letters to Ron and Hermione while they were in the headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix and protected by the Fidelius Charm.

How could Hedwig have known where to deliver to? Is she not under the Charm because she's not human? If so, then, again, what's to stop enemies of the order owling to see if they can trace the owls back.

I am plagued by questions.

Comments

[silveraspen]

I'd go for "enchanted" or "specially bred," myself, as to why the owls can find people.

How Hedwig (and others) would know where to deliver, I'm not sure, unless it would be inherent in the spell for her (or any owl) to be able to find those who want to be found/are willing to be found by that correspondent. In the case of Hermione and the Witch Weekly-inspired letters, Hermione wasn't expecting the mail, so it wasn't precisely that she didn't want to hear from such people, and so there was no barrier against them at that time.

We can infer that there's something working along those lines, though, because Hedwig was interfered with in OotP. We presume the interference was by Umbridge in her effort to find Sirius or evidence of communication between Harry and Sirius. If she could have directly sent an owl, she would have done so, but instead she tried to tamper with an owl already in flight and one that was "authorized."

Weak, probably, but it's the best I can do for now.