{"id":112248,"date":"2022-06-08T06:15:54","date_gmt":"2022-06-08T12:15:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=112248"},"modified":"2022-06-08T09:13:34","modified_gmt":"2022-06-08T15:13:34","slug":"short-eared-owl-diving-on-prey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/08\/short-eared-owl-diving-on-prey\/","title":{"rendered":"Short-eared Owl Diving On Prey"},"content":{"rendered":"

An eleven photo series.<\/p>\n

In a post three days ago I mentioned that I had fun with Short-eared Owls despite the fact that they “toyed” with me all morning by staying on the “wrong” side of the road, so they were always (and I do mean always<\/em>) sidelit or backlit. I also said that I’d be posting some of those photos soon anyway. These are some of them.<\/p>\n

Following is a series of eleven photos presented in the order they were taken and without any skips. Once again I’ll keep my narration to a minimum because the photos mostly speak for themselves.<\/p>\n

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This male (I believe) Short-eared Owl had been hunting from this fence post when it became obvious to me that he spotted prey to my left. He didn’t dive on it immediately, instead he stared intently at it and made several minor false starts before finally taking off after it.<\/p>\n

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He had a lot of fence line to negotiate.<\/p>\n

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The potential prey was about three fence posts away from the post he’d been perched on. Here his left wingtip must have nearly brushed the barbed wire. Maybe it actually did.<\/p>\n

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This is nearly the same spot on the same fence line that I cut Galileo, the fledgling Short-eared Owl, out of barbed wire<\/a><\/span><\/span> almost exactly six years ago. So yes, having this owl fly so close to the same fence for so long made me nervous. At least I had my wire cutters with me, just in case.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/p>\n

I knew I’d get at least one shot with a wire blocking his eye.<\/p>\n

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The presumed vole was so far away in fairly tall grass I’m surprised he spotted it in the first place. Perhaps all he saw was the grass moving and not the actual vole.<\/p>\n

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In the end it was a miss. Immediately after this shot he abandoned the attempt and veered off to his right to hunt elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Some of these photos aren’t quite as sharp as I prefer and the sidelight\/backlight isn’t ideal but what should I expect in that kind of light and with the fence often in front of him? I was just happy to keep him in frame for as long as I did and that he was ‘sharp enough’, whatever that is. And of course that he didn’t get hung up on the wire.<\/p>\n

Besides, in my view any time spent with a Short-eared Owl is time well spent.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PS – I want to devote as little space to my surgery recovery as possible but, in case you missed it and you’re curious, yesterday I added a “surgery update” addendum<\/a><\/span><\/span> to the end of my post of two days ago.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An eleven photo series.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,356],"tags":[35,4748,146,3257,279,311],"class_list":["post-112248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-diving-on-prey","tag-flight","tag-galileo","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/short-eared-owl-8782-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-tcs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112248"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112301,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112248\/revisions\/112301"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}