{"id":16969,"date":"2013-07-16T04:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-07-16T10:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=16969"},"modified":"2013-07-15T19:28:35","modified_gmt":"2013-07-16T01:28:35","slug":"a-wet-winking-great-horned-owl-fledgling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/16\/a-wet-winking-great-horned-owl-fledgling\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wet, Winking Great Horned Owl Fledgling"},"content":{"rendered":"

This image\u00a0gives me the warm fuzzies for some reason.<\/p>\n

I was on my family farm in Montana and it had been raining hard.\u00a0 When the rain stopped (it was still heavily overcast and relatively dark) I decided to go outside and peek around the corner of an old granary to see if one of the adult Great Horned Owls was perched in its\u00a0favorite spot\u00a0– a high cutout on the end of\u00a0a different\u00a0granary.\u00a0\u00a0 So I very slowly sneaked up until I could see around the corner but the owl wasn’t there so I decided to wait and see if it showed up.<\/p>\n

After a few minutes I gave up (it was cold and wet) and started to put my gear away when I just happened to look almost straight up the side of the granary I was hiding behind and there was a young Great Horned Owl looking down at me from so close I could barely focus on it.\u00a0 It was wet from the rain and it showed no fear – only sleepy\u00a0curiosity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"great<\/a><\/p>\n

1\/60, f\/9, ISO 250 (a mistake), 500 f\/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, called in or set up<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I love the half-closed, fuzzy eyelid and the ear tufts or “horns” that are just beginning to form\u00a0on this young owl.<\/p>\n

The eyelids of birds are not used for blinking – the nictitating membrane serves that lubricating purpose.\u00a0 And most birds, when sleeping, raise the lower eyelid to cover the eye.\u00a0 But the horned owls, including the Great Horned Owl, lower the upper eyelid instead.<\/p>\n

Not a great image in this light but I thought the subject made up for it.<\/p>\n

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

I love the half-closed, fuzzy eyelid and the ear tufts or “horns” that are just beginning to form on this young owl.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"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":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":[334,361,405,1493],"tags":[1575,547,103,1576,145,159,1577,515],"class_list":["post-16969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birds","category-family-farm-in-northwest-montana","category-great-horned-owls-owls","category-montana-favorite-locations","tag-blinking","tag-bubo-virginianus","tag-cut-bank-montana","tag-eyelid","tag-fledgling","tag-great-horned-owl","tag-horned-owls","tag-nictitating-membrane"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-4pH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16969","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=16969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16969\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}