{"id":168450,"date":"2025-05-30T06:08:50","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T12:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=168450"},"modified":"2025-05-30T07:00:07","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T13:00:07","slug":"short-eared-owl-flying-the-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/30\/short-eared-owl-flying-the-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"Short-eared Owl “Flying The Wire”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shades of Galileo.<\/p>\n

Readers already know that last weekend I had pretty good luck with Short-eared Owls in Utah’s west desert. Three days ago I posted some faraway flight shots of one of them and promised there’d be more Shortie photos coming soon where the owl was closer to me. I finally got those photos processed, so today’s the day.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The owl, perched on a metal fence post, was much closer than the owls I posted three days ago but ‘he’ was strongly sidelit or even nearly backlit, depending on what direction he was turned on his perch. For most of the time I was with him he was hunting the tall grasses to the right so he was turned that direction, which kept his face in shade.<\/p>\n

Here he’d turned nearly 180\u00b0 on his perch, which finally lit up some of his face. I didn’t know it at the time but he turned this direction so he could fly to a faraway fencepost behind me and try his hunting luck from there.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

The first photo I got after he took off. This might be my favorite shot of the bunch.<\/p>\n

Beginning with photo #1, these first six photos are sequential without any skips.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Since he was headed to another fence post far behind me, he seemed to be following the upper strand of barbed wire which I call “flying the wire”. That made me more than a little nervous because this owl was only a couple of hundred yards away from the strand of barbed wire I had to cut in order to free Galileo<\/a><\/span><\/span>, the fledgling Short-eared Owl who had been snagged by barbed wire in June of 2016.<\/p>\n

I can’t believe that was nine years ago.<\/p>\n

With this owl so close to the wire, that thought gives me the willies. Thankfully, this time there were no nasty incidents but later today it’s my intention to check and see if the two heavy duty wire cutters are still under the back seat of my pickup.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

He continued to fly the wire but when his wings were up, I could crop to a composition I like that didn’t include…<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

any of the wire.<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But it was still there and he was still following it.<\/p>\n

In shots like this it can be difficult to tell where the owl is relative to the wire. Is he directly above it, on the far side of it or this side of it? Since the owl is sharp and the wire isn’t, that tells us that the owl and wire are in different planes, so he isn’t directly above the wire.<\/p>\n

But is he on this side of the wire or on the other side. Can you tell?<\/p>\n

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1\/5000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Three shots in the burst later he passed behind the first fence post down the line. Now we know where he was relative to the wire.<\/p>\n

I got quite a few more photos of him after this one but many of them are similar so I’ll leave most of them out.<\/p>\n

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1\/4000, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

But six frames later he was still flying the wire, although by now he was lower and a little further behind it, which made the wire blurrier but gave him more room for his left wing on the downstroke.<\/p>\n

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1\/3200, f\/5.6, ISO 800, Canon R5, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Eventually he had to pass behind another fence post. I got a few more shots of him after this one but after that he was so far behind me I couldn’t keep him in my viewfinder with my lens pointed out my open pickup window.<\/p>\n

Photographically, it was a good thing for me that he was flying the wire. If he’d turned a few degrees to his left I wouldn’t have had any light on his face or eye and if he’d turned a few degrees to his right he’d have been flying away from me.<\/p>\n

I didn’t have much wiggle room but he stayed within the narrow parameters, thanks to “flying the wire”.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Shades of Galileo. (9 photos)<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168451,"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":[35,603,7817,311,533],"class_list":["post-168450","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-barbed-wire","tag-short-eared-owl-takeoff-and-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-3587-for-FB-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-HOW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168450","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=168450"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":168500,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168450\/revisions\/168500"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}