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.