And now, a special treat

Do I spoil you guys or what?

This is Glaring Baby: the movie. At 34 and 48 seconds you can hear Threatening Baby calling back, and if you listen carefully, at 21 seconds you can hear another call which I believe is the parent. I never did find the parent once it went cryptic, but that call came repeatedly and from the direction the parent had taken. It's not what you expect from an adult owl, but you have to realize that the hooting of owls, like most bird sounds we're used to hearing, is actually adult subject matter. Those loud calls are talking about territory and sex. Talking to their young, birds use different language, just like we do.

The more I read about and watch birds, the more we're not all that different from them.

The annoying humming sound in the video is, of course, mosquitoes, and believe me, it was not at all easy to keep the camera shake down to this level for 1:15 with mosquitoes all over me. Considering also that this is in 24X zoom, I did fairly well, I think.

So yeah. I hope you enjoyed this, because I shot it on purpose for you guys.

Threatening Baby: still looking badass

So this is Threatening Baby, sitting up a tree where he can't have walked up. In the first photo he's staring at Tinky-Winky, if you're wondering. I don't know if he's hunting for himself yet, but he's sure interested in her. Most owls like to look at her, because she looks so tasty.

One thing you can see here is that Threatening Baby already has much of his non-fuzzy juvenal plumage, whereas Glaring Baby still has a lot of raggeddy-looking baby down. This causes me to wonder how many days apart they are. There didn't seem to be a huge size difference when they were both fungal-looking fuzzy things huddled together on a tree trunk, but once they started moving about, Threatening Baby was clearly well ahead in his developmental stages. The book I'm reading right now (The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behaviour), though otherwise a treasure trove of information, doesn't say much about owls, possibly because Mr. Sibley lives in the US where there is night in the summer and so owls aren't easy to observe. It does mention about some other species however, that the hatchlings who call the loudest or most persistently get fed the most, then they grow up faster, then they become more independent and start calling less, and so as the more assertive siblings get older, the quieter ones, if still alive, start getting more attention; the result being that the parents don't have to feed every chick intensively at the same time, and therefore each chick gets a chance to be the centre of attention as needed. Pretty cool, huh? So, maybe great horned owls do that too. And maybe I need a book dedicated entirely to the life and behaviour of great horned owls.

Of course Sibley also doesn't mention how many days apart owls lay their eggs or how many eggs they lay. Again, that whole cryptic nightbird thing. Most birds in the book lay eggs every 24 to 48 hours. Now these two babies look a lot more than 48 hours apart to me, so... Who knows. Maybe there was a middle child who didn't make it and these two are four days apart. Another possibility, judging by some of the other birds in the book, would be that two females laid one egg each in the same nest. I'm still under the impression that I've seen two different adults at the site, and in species where both parents raise the young, some times females who can't get their own man will lay eggs in a mated female's nest so their babies still get to have two parents. Clever, eh? So yeah, maybe these two are actually half-siblings and the younger one's mother is AWOL. But, I've never heard or seen three adults in this area, and there is at least one other site where at least one other great horned owl lives, quite far way, which suggests that they have rather vast territories, so... I have no idea.

In any case, Threatening Baby is alive and flying, and Glaring Baby is alive and almost ready to fly. I'm glad.

Almost all the photos in these two posts are in 1600 ISO, by the way, in case you're wondering why they're not quite as awesome. So in fact, considering it's 21:48 in the woods, they're extremely awesome.

Glaring Baby: still alive!

I had stopped stalking the owl babies while Tinky-Winky was in hospital, and I thought they had moved on anyway, but then this week I located a much thicker, more sheltered cluster of trees some distance away from the initial location, from which emanated persistent owlet calls. I thought either there was a second nest, which was implausible so close to the first one and given that I didn't see any parents there earlier in the year, or, Threatening Baby was hiding in there. I resisted the temptation to go snooping around the thicket, but then Thursday night, I saw an owl fly out of it that was curiously shaped, as if fuzzier than normal. Hmmmm...

Friday, no owls.

This morning, an owl flew out of the thicket, and it was an adult, but with what seemed like a long strip of rabbit fur dangling from one claw. It perched on various trees all around the thicket and didn't pay much attention to me, and the calling persisted. I took some pictures, but none of them turned out.

This evening, coming along the trail, I saw an owlet sitting on a leaning tree right above the trail some ways ahead. Holy crap, I thought, it can fly! But, it can't. It walked up the leaning tree and tried repeatedly to gather up the nerve to jump off, but it didn't. The parent flew away as usual. This was a good tactic when the babies were just eggs and I would see the parent and chase after it and never notice the eggs; now that the babies are walking around and making a lot of noise and don't know how to be cryptic, the parent is really just alerting me to their presence and then disappearing.

Anyway, I figured this must be Threatening Baby. I've long suspected that Glaring Baby must have come to an untimely death, because I could only hear one baby voice in the thicket. So I took various photos of this guy, hoping he'd jump after all, which he didn't. As you can see, he glared at me repeatedly and didn't seem to be in a particularly good mood. After a while I decided to move on before he got so pissed off he might do something foolish, like jumping off the tree before he's ready. I figured he'd have a bitch of a time trying to walk down again as it is; let alone that in order to get to the tree, he must have walked through all the bushes and across the trail where anyone might have seen him, or a quad might have run him over. That's one brave flightless bird, for all he looks like a ratty old mop.

And just a couple steps down the trail, I found his/her brother or sister, sitting up a tree where he clearly had to have flown. So since Threatening Baby is the more advanced one, that makes this one Glaring Baby, Imagine that... S/he is still alive after all!

Well, I'm glad to see you, Glaring Baby. Good luck with the flying thing.

One last owl

This is the last time I saw any of the owls. A parent was attending the nest area on Wednesday morning, and s/he flew off just as I shot him. I haven't seen the babies in days, which isn't such a big deal, but I also haven't heard them. For a while you could hear them calling the parents quite a bit. And I haven't seen either parent at the nest area since Wednesday. I suppose the babies must be gone, hopefully alive and well.

Owl in 48X zoom

Actually, most of the owl photos have a fair bit of zoom, but this is the original, not a detail. Let me say this again: this is not a detail of a larger photo. Yes, it's in 48X zoom. That's still pretty mind-boggling.


And this is what a boggled owl looks like, apparently. I had previously seen this pose in Sibley. It's the "threatening" pose. It also comes with beak snapping and hissing like a cat. I kid you not. It hissed at me.


The other sibling still sticks to the "evil glare from behind the bushes" method. They're certainly becoming more active, hence why I almost stepped on Threatening Baby. (It's an exaggeration. I was still several feet away when I spotted it.) The other day I saw one on a log preening itself, but I didn't have the camera because it was drizzling.

Also, it's lucky for me there wasn't a parent around just then, because great horned owls attack people who bother their babies.

Owls rock. And Canon rocks.

No more owls

I stayed away from the owl area last night, because they probably don't enjoy seeing me as much as I enjoy seeing them, and then I went this morning and they're not there. At least they're not visible. I didn't want to go trampling around the bush looking for them, because it's disruptive to them and none of my business where they are, but certainly they weren't in plain sight. It's for the best, although I'm gonna miss them. I hope they both grow up and have long healthy lives. And I still hope I get a flight feather when the parents molt.

Sigh...

Still alive!

When I got to the owl spot on our midday walk, there were no owls. Instead, ATV tire marks led off the trail (which is off-limit to ATVs, but of course ATV riders are too illiterate to know, and bylaw is too lazy to care) and through the former location of the owls. Oh no! A horrible catastrophe has befallen my owls!

I followed the tracks to where the owls used to be and there was no evidence of a catastrophe. Or a nest, either. No pellets, broken egg shells, feathers, anything. So clearly, that wasn't where the actual nest was. So I looked around, meaning with my eyes, not walking around poking my nose in things, and in a much more sheltered location about 25' away, there were the babies again. Still staring at me and doing nothing, but no longer joined at the hips.

Phew...

Daily dose of owl

Once again a parent was sitting on a tree near the hatchlings, but I was so busy looking for the babies, I didn't see the parent until after it saw me, so it took off before I could shoot it, again. With much effort I was able to find it again on a tree much further away, but with a clear line of sight to the babies. Clever, eh? And again, I'm repeating myself, but even knowing it was there, I had a really hard time finding it. Which is why of course it spots me before I spot it and flies away. Tomorrow morning hopefully it will be at the nest again, and I'll approach really really carefully and get a picture of all three of them before it can see me.

Meanwhile, the babies look much the same as yesterday and the day before, except it looks like they got rained on in the night. Actually, yesterday it rained torrentially from 11:15 until noon, so they must have looked quite miserable. Some times it probably sucks to be an owl.

One thing I'm looking forward to is when the adults molt their flight feathers. I'm hoping they'll still be hanging around this nest sight so I can illegally harvest some of the shed feathers. I found an owl feather the first summer I was here, but I used it to make a dreamcatcher for an elder in T—. Now I have eagle feathers, raven feathers, gull feathers and a northern flicker feather, but I'd really like some owl feathers. I figure if eagle feathers are for strength, then probably raven feathers are for resourcefulness and owl feathers are for wisdom and overall badass-ness.

I love owls. Did I say that before?

Where is Waldo?

There is an owl in this wide-angle shot. It's being cryptic. Again, I'm showing you so you can appreciate how hard it is to find a bird, even a bird that large and even when you already know it's there. Several people have commented about my owl photos that they never see owls in the wild or that they can't photograph them... This is half of why. Maybe the other half is living in places that aren't good owl habitats, like cities, but the fact that you can be looking right at it and not see it is definitely a major factor.

The exciting life of owls

Apparently, being a baby owl isn't a very aerobic activity. I don't think these guys have moved from this spot since I first saw them. And they're always glued to each other like this. Maybe they're Siamese owls? No, of course not. They'd be dead by now. But maybe they're not actually fledglings like I thought. Maybe this is actually where the nest is and they're still too young to leave the nest, in which case that's rather alarming. It's a really exposed location for ground-nesting birds.

The good thing about it is that even though I know exactly what I'm looking for and where, I still have to look for them to find them each time, which means that the casual passerby probably just walks right by them without noticing. Owls are quite good at being invisible in plain sight like this. Apparently it's called "cryptic stance."

Live long and prosper, little ones. Your secret location is safe with me.

Even cooler owl sighting

This time I saw three owls. One of the parents was sitting on a tree near the fledglings, though s/he took off before I could get any photos. I only took seven frames of the babies, because of the mosquitoes and because these guys don't really do anything except stare at me.

I read the owl chapter in Sibley (The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behaviour, not the field guide) and it says that great horned owls nest on or close to the ground and the chicks fledge before they can fly, so this is actually where their nest is. On the one hand, that's pretty cool, because I now have a reliable source of owl sightings until the babies learn to fly, and on the other hand, it's worrisome, because it's a very exposed high-traffic location with lots of people and dogs. Loitering near nest sites is never a good practice anyway, because it can spook the parents and attract predators. Hmmmm... Some times I hate ethics. These guys are clearly not spooked by me since they're not threatening me. Owls, especially great horned owls, are like cats: if you threaten them, they fight. Adults will attack predators, including humans, to defend their nests and young, and fledglings can assume some threatening postures and presumably do some ass-kicking of their own. So since the adults haven't attacked me and the babies haven't threatened me, even this close to their nest, they mustn't see me as a hazard. In fact, I suspect the parents are wondering if I'd be suitable for food, from the way they react to my movements.

Tinky-Winky hasn't been with me on any of my owl sightings so far, which is good because she's highly suitable for owl food, and she doesn't even know it. I'm not concerned that she'd hurt the chicks, because I've seen a raven stand up to her successfully, and these guys are much scarier than ravens, but she could stress them out and/or leave a trail for bigger dogs to follow. Or get eaten.

So, yeah. On the one hand, I know where there is an owl nest, which is good, and on the other hand, other predators might find out too, which is bad.

This reminds me, too, another reason it's become much harder to find birds to photograph is that they're brooding right now. In the spring, when they're getting territory and mating, they want to be seen, so they make a lot of noise and show themselves. Now that they have eggs or hatchlings, the last thing they want is to be seen. You can actually tell just by listening that the bird song has changed since spring. Then once the chicks are fledged, I think most species molt, at which time they'll also be trying to hide, and so they won't be easily visible again until they start getting ready for fall migration.

Back to my great horned owls, another cool thing about great horned owls is this: the eggs take about 35 days to hatch, and the hatchlings take three months to fledge, which is to say, these little dudes must have been laid no later than the last week of February, at which time, if I recall correctly, it was about -40°C in town. Pretty crazy, eh?

I love great horned owls. They're so badass.

Owls. Plural.

Once again, lucky for me that I'm familiar with my habitat, because these didn't look like owls to the naked eye, but then I was thinking "you know, this tree doesn't usually have fuzzy growths on it." So I stopped and had a look.






They're fledgling great horned owls. Seriously. I'd never seen a fledgling owl before. I'd never seen two owls at once before, either. I'm not sure if the photos are quite in focus. The branch in front of them looks very sharp, suggesting the focus was a little shorter than it should have been, but then, when things are this fuzzy, it's hard to tell.

Unless I see them again, I don't imagine I'll have a cooler bird sighting than this for the rest of the summer.