{"id":168401,"date":"2025-05-27T06:09:08","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T12:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168401"},"modified":"2025-05-27T08:14:52","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T14:14:52","slug":"short-eared-owl-in-flight-a-six-image-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/27\/short-eared-owl-in-flight-a-six-image-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Short-eared Owl In Flight – A Six Image Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two days ago I finally had some pretty good luck with Short-eared Owls in the west desert.<\/p>\n

Like last time, I found three of them and photographed several of them in flight and hunting from fence post perches. Sometimes they weren’t close and sometimes they were backlit or sidelit but I was able to take several series of photos of them that I like well enough to post. Today I’ll share one of those series.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 400, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The Shortie was hunting on the west side of the road, so the early morning light was good. But I wasn’t particularly close to the owl so these photos have been cropped significantly. I got quite a few shots before this one but this is the first one where the owl was ‘close enough’ and I had light on its face.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 400, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

At this point the owl was close enough to me that it momentarily looked my way, rather than looking down or forward while it was hunting.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 400, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Here I’m glad I caught the owl between the two largest whitish splotches in the background (rocks), instead of having one of them intersecting the bird. The smaller, slightly darker one behind the tail doesn’t bother me. Much.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 400, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

I like the sagebrush in the background, but then I usually do.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 400, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

This is the last shot I got where the owl was still looking at me. After this it…<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 400, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

looked forward for a moment and then turned away from me to continue hunting.<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that I wish the owl had been closer, but the bird was sharp enough that I could crop significantly and still have acceptable image quality. In fact, these photos are sharp enough that I had to cut my normal sharpening routine down by half, so they didn’t look “crinkly”. During processing, all six photos were cropped to only 6 MP and I still think they held up reasonably well.<\/p>\n

A very nice change from all those mornings in the same area when heat waves caused all of my photos to be soft. Sometimes dreadfully soft.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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Note: I photographed other owls that morning too. I’ll be posting some of those photos in the near future. And yes, for those photos I was closer to the birds.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

Two days ago I finally had some pretty good luck with Short-eared Owls in the west desert.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168407,"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":[6,334,356],"tags":[35,7816,7783,311,533],"class_list":["post-168401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-large-crops-with-the-canon-r5","tag-short-eared-owl-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-3947-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HO9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168401","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=168401"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168441,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168401\/revisions\/168441"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}