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