Quick note: It's likely that there is some charm placed upon owl that allows them to Apparate or do whatever it is that allows them to get to where they need to so fast, and that the reasons owls are used is tradition. Remember the tropical bird Sirius sent at the beginning of GoF?

There are obviously different triggers for portkeys. Whatever Dumbledore used in the Ministry, the activate-on-touch Triwizard portkey, and the timed portkey at the beginning of GoF. Maybe more.

 

Don't forget that even the Order didn't use Patronuses all the time, as in the beginning of OOTP they use sparks like fireworks to send the all clear, you could ask why they didn't send the patronus, maybe it's all a matter of speed, then again Hagrid got there quick in GoF, but maybe he didn't have very far to travel.

 

Also, Dumbledore only taught a very select group of people how to use the Patronus charm to send messages.

 

First of all, the Owls are another idea by a Author that didn't think much about what she wrote and on closer examination the whole books are full of giant plot holes. They are awesome books, or at least the first three, with the next two being good, and the last two being fail, but full of Plot holes none the less. The owls are an Awesome Idea, but under examination they dont work.

Now that the necessary silliness is out of the way, how I have alway thought it worked.
In the book series, "TheChronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever" by Stephen R. Donaldson there is a race of Horses, called the Ranyhyn. Now the Ranyhyn are very special creatures that they can bend time as such. I suppose the better term is see the future. Thus in the novel when the hero needs one and shouts there name, within five minutes they appear even if he is on the other side of the world.

Now as owls always went to the person in the books I assume that they dont wait in offices waiting for them to come back. Thus they must always fly to the person. As such they need to know where a person shall be at what time. So while they can't technically see the future they can see a persons location at a particular time. This is probably caused by a spell but could be caused by the owls. It also must be easy to ward against and do something bad to humans otherwise they would cast it on themselves.

 

The "owls can apparate/portkey" idea doesn't make sense. Note that when Sirius was far away in hiding, it took longer to trade owls than it does over short range. If owls were magically transported, it wouldn't take very long to send letters back and forth. It is a plot hole: the ministry managed to send an owl to Harry for breaking the law within minutes, indicating possible owl apparition, but at other times it took days for owls to travel back and forth.

 

You could look at it like this:

The Ministry of Magic is located in london. Harry lives in a London suburb (to my knowledge. I might be wrong about that).

The question is, how long do you think it would take a bird to fly from downtown London to Surrey? I don't know English geography that well, but if one of the resident Brits cared enough, they could actually come up with a simple calculation that shows how long it would take an average bird to fly from point A to point B.

All you need is the distance from the general area of the Ministry of Magic, as depicted in the books, to Surrey, and the maximum or average speed that your everyday bird (or owl) can fly.

Even if it would take an owl more than 10 minutes to fly from London to Surrey, you could come up with a simple cop out 'magic' answer.

Like, maybe the owls employed by the Underage Use of Magic Office are charmed to be able to fly a lot faster than your average owl. Or something like that.

 

Surrey is an entire county distinct from London. See here:



Surrey is apparently 642 square miles large, so whether or not you could count Little Whinging as part of London (some parts of Surrey are also kinda part of London - I stayed in Wellington recently, and though it is in Surrey it is served by the London transport system) depends entirely on where within Surrey it is.

 

Ah. See, I knew it was close to London, but I didn't know it was a whole county away. English geography is something that was never really touched upon in any HS class that I can remember besides "here's England, this is Ireland, and there's Scotland".

Still, depending on where fictional Little Whinging is (it is fictional, right?), you could have Little Whinging on the border between the two counties, and then it really isn't that much of a stretch, considering we are talking about magic here.

I would say that 5 minutes or under is unlikely, even if you have Little Whinging right on the border, but 10-20 minutes isn't out of the realm of possibility. I don't have the books on me, so I can't check to see how fast the owl arrived in CoS and OOTP.

 

Little Whinging is close enough to London to be served by the transit system...Harry took the train back from his first visit to Diagon Alley. So that puts it into the closer to London rather than the farther away parts of Surrey.

So, the books don't help all that much, because, surprise, they once again contradict themselves.

The broom ride from #4 to #12 doesn't help all that much, either...I checked, Moody seems to have led them all over the country before returning them to London.

 

Uh...I live in Norfolk and I can get a train straight to London. So the fact that Harry caught a train to London doesn't really say anything.

 

About that memorything, getting someones memories, would make you think they're your own when you recall them (that it's you doing all the stuff), thus making your grasp of who you are kind of screwed, right?

 

There is one particular thing with owls that sticks out in my mind during topics like these. It is with Hedwig in PoA, where she arrives at the Leaky Cauldron in synchronisation with Harry.
Harry, of course, had just spent the last hour or so travelling all over Great Britain inside the Knight Bus. For all intents and purposes, from Hedwig's perspective, he had been erratically moving around with no set destination in sight. Yet, she manages to time her flight from Privet Drive to Charing Cross Road perfectly.
Make of that what you will.

 

This whole discussion appears little wierd to me. Once, when discussing a new Terminator TV Series, somebody written a post: OMG, whe did she (as in cyborg) eat chips??!! They cannot eat!! Series Sux!!!. It started a very seriouse discussion about why cybrorgs need proteins to reproduce their skin loss (lmao, i talk with such a weird people ^^). Someone smart responded: Surely, if you belive that you can time travel and build a machine with artificail intelligence, growing human skin, you could as well belive that the can eat a fucking chips.

To the topic: Why do you try to make the magical world as much mundane as it can be? Why cannot MAICAL owls travel MAGICLY fast in this little MAGICAL world? All this measuring of distances is a nerdy thing to do.

In Forgotten realms books, everything was magical - every trader had magical swords for sell, everywhere there were magical traps and magical creaturtes, and this world stopped being wonderful - it was boring, becouse the magic from wonder went mundane.

Don't let HP do that, you shouldn't demand an answer for every question. Let it be.

 

That's the thing SerDel. We aren't asking for a mundane explanation for a magical question. We're asking for a plausible magical explanation for a magical problem.

We don't want to be made boring, we want it exciting, but understandable.

 

You know... he's probably right, but honestly, how lame is that? We should just assume magic is all knowing and that the author hasn't made a mistake because the author says so? Like, it's all well for JK to come out tomorrow and say, "Oh yeah, owls have a secret magic power passed down from the time of Merlin that gives them the ability to find anybody when a wizard bestows upon them a letter." Doesn't mean she's not lying, and it doesn't mean that the author didn't mess up.

DLP wouldn't exist if Harry Potter didn't exist. The site thrives through discussion about Harry Potter. So, like lawl, wtf you expect?

 

LOL, I don't think we're discussing, so much as dissecting, often tearing apart, canon details...

Frankly, anything JKR said wouldn't be a lie - it's her fucking story. The fact that it most likely won't make sense to us, like all of the other bullshit factoids she's dropped on is, is largely irrelevant - 'cos it's her fucking story. This isn't a monarchy that we can overthrow if the leader spews nonsense that doesn't sit well with the people; it's some saggy-titted Britwoman's musings, and we're just some 'netheads reading relatively worthless fanfiction.

@SerDel: All that being said, it's still fun to come up with something that "connects the dots" within the canon HP-verse. Like MC said, it's pretty exciting when people pose a theory for some unexplained fact - oftentimes it ends up in a work of fanfiction, and turns out pretty cool. And some of the authors on this site work really well when presented with a solid theory that leads to a plot bunny.

Again, like MC said, that sort of dissection can add to the 'verse, as opposed to dull it down.

 

The problem isn't the speed of owls. If they could travel magically fast then that'd be okay, same if they only flew at normal speeds.

The problem is that they seem to do both at different times.

 

How's that a problem, though? Fawkes does it, more or less (flame travel vs. flying). Perhaps owls simply slow down at certain distances within their target.