It seems that the images folder was not part of your class path. In Eclipse, this is not what they call the build path.
Right-click on the images folder, select "Build Path" and use as the source folder. Now the folder will be added to the classpath whenever you launch the application through Eclipse. If you do, you need to change your path to
Image owl = new ImageIcon(this.getClass().getResource("/owl.gif")).getImage();
because now everything in images will be placed directly in the classpath.
Instead, you can make a package called images in your regular src folder and name it
Image owl = new ImageIcon(this.getClass().getResource("/images/owl.gif")).getImage();
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