appears <\/em>to be carrying the vole it its right\u00a0foot early on in the sequence (though I can’t be absolutely\u00a0sure) and then later photos in the same sequence show the vole in the left foot.\u00a0 The bird must have transferred the vole from foot to foot\u00a0in mid-flight which might still demonstrate a preference for the left foot.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nThese results would seem to indicate a strong preference by this male for the left foot when carrying voles in spite of the relatively low sample size of 13.\u00a0 I’m very curious if this is simply a trait of this individual bird or if it’s possible that many or most Short-eared Owls are left-handed\u00a0but have been able to find no other information on the subject for this species.\u00a0 However, recent research does indicate that most parrot species are left-handed\u00a0– the Cockatiel being the exception.<\/p>\n
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![\"Female](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/short-eared-owl-7907.jpg\" "\\"Female")
<\/p>\n
\u00a0Female carrying a vole<\/em><\/p>\nI did get one photo of the female carrying a vole.\u00a0 Typically she would wait in the nest for the male to deliver the meal.\u00a0 He would always land on a nearby perch with the vole for a short time before bringing the vole to the female and\u00a0babies.\u00a0 Occasionally he would wait too long and the female would become impatient and call to him in an obvious attempt to\u00a0get him to speed up the delivery.\u00a0 On one occasion she ran out of patience, flew out of the nest to the male, retrieved the vole and carried it back to the nest.\u00a0\u00a0 The photo above is of the female on that return trip to the nest.\u00a0\u00a0 You can see her brood patch on\u00a0her belly above the vole.<\/p>\n
And yes, she was carrying the vole in her left foot!<\/p>\n
One out of one in the\u00a0 case of the female is statistically meaningless of course but I still found it interesting and it remains that in the case of both birds collectively these\u00a0owls virtually always and perhaps without exception carried the vole in their left foot.\u00a0 I find that fascinating!<\/p>\n
Ron\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last summer Mia and I spent four days photographing a family of Short-eared Owls in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.\u00a0 There were two\u00a0baby owls in a nest under a sagebrush guarded over constantly by the female while the male hunted and brought in food.\u00a0\u00a0 That food in every\u00a0instance that we saw was\u00a0a vole\u00a0(mouse-like rodent).\u00a0\u00a0Many of the\u00a0photos I took were of the male in flight, returning to the area of the nest\u00a0with\u00a0a vole in his talons. Male with vole It wasn’t until I returned home and began processing the images that I began to notice that the male always seemed to carry the vole in its left foot.\u00a0 This piqued my curiosity about something I’d never considered – do some birds show “handedness” – the preference of using one limb as opposed to the other?\u00a0 Could this male owl, or perhaps all Short-eared Owls, be left-“handed”? \u00a0\u00a0Once again, carrying the vole in the left foot So I decided to do an inventory of my images of these birds to see what would turn up.\u00a0 After culling my photos of these owls from this trip I had 271 photos to go through.\u00a0 Most of those were flight shots of the male and in more than half of them he was carrying a vole.\u00a0 My goal was to try to determine how many “sorties” he made with a vole that I had photographed (I often got multiple shots of the male with the same vole in the same sortie) and determine what percentage of the time he…<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,395,356],"tags":[41,90,109,137,146,170,199,211,228,244,263,279,315],"class_list":["post-1315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bird-oddities","category-miscellaneous","category-short-eared-owls","tag-baby","tag-cockatiel","tag-digital-time-stamp","tag-female","tag-flight","tag-handedness","tag-left-handed","tag-male","tag-nest","tag-parrot","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-vole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-ld","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Male](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/short-eared-owl-8097.jpg\" "\\"Male")
<\/p>\n![\"Once](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/short-eared-owl-7866.jpg\" "\\"Once")
<\/p>\n![\"Once](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/short-eared-owl-7133.jpg\" "\\"Once")
<\/p>\n![\"And](\"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/short-eared-owl-7878.jpg\" "\\"And")
<\/a><\/p>\n