{"id":112480,"date":"2022-06-13T04:56:48","date_gmt":"2022-06-13T10:56:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=112480"},"modified":"2022-06-13T05:33:28","modified_gmt":"2022-06-13T11:33:28","slug":"fighting-short-eared-owls-the-rest-of-the-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/13\/fighting-short-eared-owls-the-rest-of-the-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Short-eared Owls – The Rest Of The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three days ago I posted a single photo of fighting Short-eared Owls as a ‘teaser’ because, due to post-surgical discomfort, I couldn’t sit at my computer for long enough to process all of the fighting photos I intended to. Today I finish telling the story.<\/p>\n

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Eleven days ago I spent much of my morning attempting to photograph two adult Short-eared Owls hunting from fence posts that were always backlit or sidelit. The two owls were nearly always about a quarter mile away from each other but I usually knew roughly where each of them was. They only directly interacted with each other for approximately one minute but that interaction consisted of a series of back-to-back aerial encounters (attacks) in what I believe was agonistic behavior by two males in defense of hunting\/breeding territory.<\/p>\n

You can imagine the difficulty of trying to photograph an extended aerial dogfight from inside my pickup so I missed a lot of interesting photos, in spite of doing some highly creative driving on the remote and completely deserted road. But I think I got enough of them in sequence to give readers a pretty good sense of what I experienced. Even in flight they were nearly always on the “wrong” side of the road so they were still backlit or sidelit and often flying away from me but I think the photos still document the behavior reasonably well.<\/p>\n

These first three photos document a single, brief encounter as the owl at bottom is approaching the other owl from behind.<\/p>\n

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The aggressor’s talons are now being brought forward in preparation for…<\/p>\n

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what I believe was a quick “tag” on the lower back of the second owl.<\/p>\n

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The victim got the ‘point’ and quickly accelerated upward to escape his attacker. After this photo was taken the two owls separated in preparation for their next encounter.<\/p>\n

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They were now far enough apart that I could only keep one of them in frame, in this case the lower one, who is now quickly rising up to the other bird for another attack.<\/p>\n

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Two shots later I could get both of them mostly in frame.<\/p>\n

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At this point I don’t think one of the owls was more aggressive than the other – they both seemed eager to join in the fray.<\/p>\n

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As they got closer to each other…<\/p>\n

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the owl on the left, and probably both owls, aggressively brought their talons forward again. The owl on the right is beginning to…<\/p>\n

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turn almost completely upside down. This is the photo I posted three days ago.<\/p>\n

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This time I don’t believe they actually made contact.<\/p>\n

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But the owl at bottom…<\/p>\n

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must have figured that with his lower position in the air he was more vulnerable so…<\/p>\n

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he apparently decided that discretion is the better part of valor and made his getaway, straight down and at speed.<\/p>\n

In approximately one minute I’d estimate that these owls had seven or eight direct encounters similar to these two but shooting through my pickup window I was only able to photograph three of them, one of them not very well. When the dogfight was over both owls returned to hunting from fence posts, once again about a quarter mile away from each other.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure what they accomplished, other than to reinforce to each other that they were both willing to defend their apparently adjoining territories. And to give this bird photographer a very exciting sixty seconds or so.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Three days ago I posted a single photo of fighting Short-eared Owls as a ‘teaser’ because, due to post-surgical discomfort, I couldn’t sit at my computer for long enough to process all of the fighting photos I intended to. Today I finish telling the story. (14 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112489,"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":[334,394,356],"tags":[415,35,5585,140,2873,279,6379,311],"class_list":["post-112480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-fighting-bird-behaviors","category-short-eared-owls","tag-agonistic-behavior","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-dogfight","tag-fighting","tag-males","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-upside-down-in-flight","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/short-eared-owl-8645-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-tgc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112480","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=112480"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112539,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112480\/revisions\/112539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}