{"id":168206,"date":"2025-05-12T06:15:28","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T12:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168206"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:28:53","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T17:28:53","slug":"short-eared-owls-hunting-and-cavorting-together-in-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/12\/short-eared-owls-hunting-and-cavorting-together-in-the-sky\/","title":{"rendered":"Short-eared Owls Hunting And Cavorting Together In The Sky"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three days ago I spent the morning of my birthday in the west desert and the best birthday present of the day was spending 32 minutes with a mated pair of Short-eared Owls. For the entire time I spent with them they were hunting an approximately 200 acre field on the west side of the road, so this time they were in good light. For a change.<\/p>\n

The bad news is that they were never very close and I was having trouble with heat waves causing soft shots. None of my photos were tack sharp but some were ‘sharp enough’ (in my judgment) to document my birthday present in a blog post.<\/p>\n

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They were hunting the huge field independently of each other so I never knew when or where one of them would appear from out of the many ravines and small valleys. Usually I only had a second or two to try to get the owl in focus before it turned away from me or disappeared in one of the many dips in the rolling field.<\/p>\n

Most often they were so far away I just watched them with my naked eye.<\/p>\n

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A vertical composition because I didn’t have enough room on the right to go horizontal.<\/p>\n

Typical of Shorties they were usually hunting quite low to the ground but…<\/p>\n

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I caught this owl pretty high up so the background bokeh is very soft and I think, pleasing.<\/p>\n

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Two frames later you’ll notice that the bird is looking up instead of down, as you’d expect from a hunting owl. That’s because the bird was beginning to fly higher in order to join the other owl that was flying above it. More about that in a minute.<\/p>\n

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This is the last shot in the short series that was sharp enough for presentation here.<\/p>\n

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I tried repeatedly to catch an owl in a dive on prey and this is the only time I succeeded. This bird had been skimming low over the sagebrush when it saw prey and dived on it. I have no idea if it caught the presumed vole it was after.<\/p>\n

A note before we proceed. For behavioral reasons I’m confident that the two owls are a mated pair but I’ll make no attempt at sexing them because their coloration was quite similar. This from Cornell on sexing Short-eared Owls:<\/em><\/p>\n

“Females generally darker dorsally owing to more brown, and ventrally owing to rust color and heavier streaking, but there is overlap and sexes are not reliably distinguished by plumage.”<\/em><\/p>\n

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As I said, these two were hunting the large field independently of each other but occasionally (3 times while I was there) their erratic hunting paths would bring them close enough together that, as if on some mysterious cue, they both rose high into the sky and began cavorting with each other.<\/p>\n

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They would repeatedly fly at each other, sometimes coming so close to each other that…<\/p>\n

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they may have made actual contact.<\/p>\n

But I’m confident they weren’t fighting (I’ve photographed fighting male Shorties<\/a><\/span><\/span> several times before). I believe this is a type of play that reinforces their pair bond. I’m also confident this wasn’t the typical “sky dancing” that Shorties are known for. I know how to recognize that behavior.<\/p>\n

It was an exciting series of encounters for the photographer, soft shots or not. When I got home my good friend and neighbor Shane Smith said that it was my birthday present from the owls.<\/p>\n

Not very scientific but I like to think so.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

A series of exciting encounters for the photographer. (9 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168214,"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":[334,395,391,356],"tags":[35,7809,178,7807,7808,7810,311,533],"class_list":["post-168206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","category-nesting-and-mating","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-how-to-sex-short-eared-owls","tag-hunting","tag-mated-pair-of-short-eared-owls","tag-short-eared-owl-diving-on-prey","tag-short-eared-owls-playing-in-flight","tag-utah-2","tag-west-desert"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/short-eared-owl-2556-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HL0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168206","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=168206"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168245,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168206\/revisions\/168245"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168214"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}