We interrupt this program

PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN AFRICA!

Ok, so that's not news. People were starving in Africa ever since I was a kid, and before. But right now, the World Food Programme is short just $191 million from their budgeted need for Somalia and the Horn of Africa.

"Just" $191 million?

That's right. Because that works out to just $11 per Canadian worker. That's half the price of a twelve-pack of beers. It could be a burger and fries. Three or four ridiculously overpriced coffees from a big franchise. There is a lot of stuff you spend $11 on that you don't even need. Just skip one of those things and save Somalia! (For now, anyway.)

Donate here. Or donate to some other charity you like. If you don't have $11, give $5. Give something. And pass it on to your friends. You'd do it if that was your kid in the photo, wouldn't you? (The photo is actually from a feeding centre in Ayod, Sudan, on March 31, 1993, because I had it handy. Starvation looks the same anywhere. Photo by Corinne Dufka/Reuters.)

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp! People starving! Help! Help! Help!

Great horned owls are back!

The great horned owl chicks left the nest in the night of June 16. That doesn't mean they can fly; they just leap out of the nest and try to hang on to branches to break their fall to the ground. Then, they hiked a far ways to a sheltered spot on the riverbank, where you could hear them but not see them. So I knew where the babies were, but I wasn't gonna go looking for them. Then today, on our afternoon walk, I found this:


Stretching Baby, sitting up a tree. Great horned owls are actually awesome climbers. They can walk up a vertical tree. Which makes sense, really, consider what evil claws they have. So when they're learning to fly, the chicks jump from a tree, fall, catch themselves any way they can, and so on to the ground. Then they climb back up and do it again and again and again, until they figure it out.

This seems very precocious compared to the ones from two years ago, both in terms of his motor skills and how advanced his molting is. That's too bad. If they learn to fly early they'll leave early, and I like having them around.

In the evening, I found Sulking Baby as well, thusly:


It looks like a horrible mutant with two bodies and one head, but actually Stretching Baby (left) has his head down and behind the leaves.

Notice, by the way, how Stretching Baby has this habit of stopping what he's doing to stare at me with big friendly eyes. That's very cute, but not a good quality in an owl. I hope he's just curious about his world, but I suspect he might be simply too accustomed to humans, which is unlikely to do him any good later on.


And this is a detail from the previous photo. Crappy resolution, but look at the size of those claws!!!

Stretching Baby

This is the other owl baby, the one I didn't name Sulking Baby. I'm thinking Sulking Baby is actually the younger one. Anyway, this one was busy beating his wings, which owl babies do to prepare to learn to fly. I imagine other species too, but I don't get to observe other species as much. So anyway, he was sitting on a branch beating his wings, but then he saw me and apparently I'm more interesting to baby owls than trying to fly, so he kept staring at me instead of beating his wings some more so I could get pictures. So, I name him Stretching Baby.

Where's Waldo?

Owl baby has a time-out

I wonder where the other owlet is. Hopefully just lying down, as opposed to, say, dead. Maybe this baby is in time-out for throwing his baby brother out of the nest.


Now this baby has to have a name. In 2009 there was Glaring Baby and Threatening Baby. To continue in the same spirit, I'm naming this one Sulking Baby.

It's too bad I don't speak Chinese, it would sound much more poetic that way.

I dub thee "Smiley"

I hate it when people call me "Smiley", but owls don't care. They just look surly all the time because of their colours and they're not interested in my opinion.

I hope to be reborn as a bird so I can not give a hoot (haha, a pun!) about people's opinions. And crap on their cars, too.

Anyway, all this to say, these photos are not cropped. I was actually that close to him. Plus the massive zoom, of course.


This one is a crop. Doesn't he look all warm and fuzzy like a teddy bear?

A few bonus owl photos

Notice how this male is silver instead of brown? I'm assuming that's for better camouflage among the silvery tree trunks. That's why I hardly ever see him.

Four owls in one photo

Just because you can't see them, doesn't mean there aren't four owls in this photo. Would I lie to you about owls? Look:


Seriously, one:


Two, three, four:


For greater clarity:


Two baby owls. The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior says that owls lay 2 to 8 eggs at 1 to 2 day intervals and hatching is asynchronous, which explains why there was one chick and then another chick. It also means that there could still be more chicks hatching, but I'm not holding my breath. It's a lot of work raising owl chicks. The book also says that the chicks are altricial, meaning under-developed. They hatch with eyes closed, sparse down, and unable to raise their heads. This means that these guys were not hatched yesterday and today. In fact, considering when I saw the owls mating, and how long great horned owls incubate, these guys probably hatched about a month ago already.

Mazel tov!

It seems to be getting harder and harder to find an angle where I can get some focus on the owls. Accordingly, this isn't in focus, but if you're wondering what you're looking at:


The babies have hatched. Or at least one baby has hatched. I only saw one, that I can tell. And as usual, I heard it first. Once before I thought I heard a hatchling, but I couldn't see anything. This time as I was walking past the tree, I clearly heard the hatchling, so I looked, and indeed, there he is.

Good for you, owl. I hope he makes it to adulthood.

Owls versus corvids

Corvids like to harass owls. And eagles. But in this case, owls. Normally, several ravens or magpies will mob an owl, but Saturday morning, there was just one raven fighting the local great horned owl. The owl won. I couldn't get any photos of that part of the fight, they were moving too fast between the trees. I did get photos of what followed, thusly:












The colours are atrocious because it was all backlit and I edited it with MS Office 2010, as I don't have PhotoShop. Anyway. The magpie, who had wisely kept out of the fight, stayed after the raven left, and kept coming up from below the owl and trying to pinch his tail feathers. Every time the owl would turn around, the magpie would duck behind the tree, and then come up the other side and grab at his tail feathers again.

Animals have such interesting lives.

To eat or not to eat

I finally got a hold of the male great horned owl. At least I'm assuming that this is the male and the one sitting on the nest all this time is the female, but it's also possible that they take turns incubating.

He's looking at my dog. In the sequence of photos, you can see him tracking her with his eyes as she walks by on the ground, completely oblivious to impending doom from above.

Can a three-pound bird eat a 22-lb dog? Somehow I doubt it. There was a news item this week wherein a poodle was allegedly snatched up and carried aloft by an eagle which then dropped it on the lawn of a senior citizens' facility. Not that I don't trust the CBC and all, but I'd like to see an eagle carrying a poodle with my own eyes before I believe it, because eagles and owls always keep a beady eye on my dog, but they've never once made any attempt to carry her away. And a poodle, even a toy poodle, isn't any smaller than a shiba. And I saw a great horned owl scare a harrier away from a rabbit it had just killed once, but neither of them tried to fly away with the rabbit; they just ate it where it lay. In fact, in my Planet Earth DVDs, there is an eagle that kills a crane, and then the crane is so heavy the eagle falls like a stone and can barely regain control. And a crane weighs 1/3 as much as my dog.

Because people in Hay River like any reason to create a big drama over nothing, I've heard people say that they're keeping their dogs inside so the owls won't eat them. But seriously, owls eat mostly mice and voles. I'm sure they could grab a puppy of a smaller breed, but I really doubt they'd attack an adult dog, even a small one.

Anyway. The other thing I like in this picture is that huge white marking on his chest. I have no other great horned owl with this much white, so that will make him easy to identify if he comes back in future years. Unless of course he passes it on to his babies.

I see you!

No matter what angle I shoot the owl from, it's always looking at me. And the photos all look pretty much the same, but I keep shooting anyway, in the hope of seeing the hatchlings some day. Surely they're going to hatch some day, right? How long can these things possibly incubate?

More owl

Bis repetita

Better angle this time. And you can see it's looking right at me.


Obligatory wide-angle shot.

NOW do you see the owl?

Honestly, that's the best angle I could get on it. The only angle, in fact. The only way I could see it was through the fork of that tree in front. I tell you, it's got kickass camouflage.

Find the owl

Remember how I saw two great horned owls making out on March 26? They've been around ever since, but I hadn't seen them again. Almost every evening when I turn the corner from Gaetz to Riverview on our evening walk, one owl will hoot once in the distance, but only once. Then they don't do it again the whole time I'm on Riverview. It's rather crazy-making. But on Saturday, one hooted just as I was walking past its position, so I was able to narrow it down to this:


See the owl?

Me neither.

See, there are three ways to find an owl: it's moving, it's calling, or it's being mobbed by other birds. Knowing you're looking at an owl is nice, but sometimes even if you know your eyes are looking right at the owl, your brain still can't make it out from its surroundings. They're that cryptic.

So let me show you in more detail:


See?

Me neither. But I, unlike you, was there in person and saw it move, so I know this:


That highlighted hump looks exactly like the tree bark, but it's actually part of an owl.

You can see it better in the one from this morning:


Crystal clear, innit?


See, you can totally see the side of its face. Besides, the tree didn't spontaneously grow a hump on its branch in two days, so it has to be an owl.

What's happening here is that the owls have a nest in that tree, which is just across the trail from where they had their young two years ago. It's actually way up the tree, which is partly why it's so hard to see or shoot them. And also defeats Sibley's theory that they nest on the ground, but that's ok. It must be hard watching owls in places that get lots of darkness. Also because it's brooding, it's lying down instead of standing upright like we normally see them. For greater clarity:


Yeah. I still can't see it either. Seriously, unless it moves, even All-Knowing-God Zoom can't find it.

That's one of the things I love about birdwatching. On the surface, all you need to do is see a bird, and you're a birdwatcher. But when you get into it, it's crazy how hard it can be.

Do you see what I see?

I'm betting you don't. I had a mighty hard time seeing what I saw, myself, and I knew I had to be seeing it somewhere.

I was looking for a fox. I saw him or her on Gaetz Drive early in the week, and of course I didn't have the camera. It was too dark to shoot anyway. The fox ran into the trees but only as far as the first two or three, and then he stalked us from behind the trees. Luckily The Creature was on leash at the time. As badass as she is, I'd really hate for her to tangle with a fox.

So every night since, I've taken the same walk, about the same time, with the camera. And of course, no fox.

Tonight, I had gotten past where I saw the fox, and onto the Kiwanis Trail, and let the dog loose, and I was walking on the crunchy snow with the hoods of my two hoodies up, and I thought I heard something. So I stopped and listened for a while, and heard a hound barking in the distance. "Dang," I thought. "It was just a hound."

I resumed walking and then I heard it again. I stopped and listened and didn't hear it.

I resumed walking and I heard it again. And this time when I stopped and listened, I heard it again.

And again.

And again.

So now I'm walking along the trail, with my hoods off for better hearing, trying to triangulate the source of the sound and find a passage back to the road so I can have a look. And it turned out, by coincidence, that the first path I found through the woods back to the road was directly opposite the source of the sound. So once I came out of the trees, I only had to scan the view for a few seconds before I saw IT.

(No, seriously, Pennywise the Clown is in this photo. Srsly.)

Now the problem is: 20:47. No light. DANG! Good thing it's Lent and I've been cutting back on swearing.

So I set the All-Knowing-God Camera for maximum speed: ISO 1600 and exposure down two stops. It was sure to look hideous, but at least it would be fast. Had I maximized it for light, it would have been ugly and blurry and completely worthless.

But I suppose you would like to see what I saw at some point, right?


Now do you see what I see?

Ok, but that's not the great part. The great part happened next, thusly:


Let me highlight it to make sure.


See? TWO great horned owls. Not one, two (2). Two great horned owls. I was aiming at the one sitting on the tree, and the second one flew in from the left. I got two shots before he left again, but in the second one you can't see both owls.


See?

You can't really tell what they're doing in these shots, but you can tell there isn't a nest. They can't have a nest in that tree anyway because first of all, great horned owls are supposed to nest on the ground, and second, great horned owls lay their eggs in February, and third, I've been walking around all winter and I haven't heard or seen any sign of owls. But clearly these two are "together". Otherwise they'd be fighting, and you can clearly see that they're not. The perching one is assuming a pose of submission to the flying one, not fighting. Actually, it totally looks like they're having sex. Otherwise why would the one be right on top of the other like that? If he was just bringing food, he'd have landed on a different branch.

Maybe they're just off to a late start. Maybe they do have chicks somewhere on the ground and have been keeping it on the down-low. Though frankly, I don't think I'm such a bad bird watcher that I'd have missed a mated pair of great horned owls every day for the last 96 days. I mean, they're LOUD.



Well, I guess we'll never know. But the moral is, just because it's too dark to shoot, doesn't mean the camera should stay at home.

And by the way, I did see the fox too, crossing Riverview right by the school. But by then it was really dark and she was moving like the wind, I wouldn't have got a shot even in good light.