{"id":28037,"date":"2014-11-21T16:34:32","date_gmt":"2014-11-21T23:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=28037"},"modified":"2014-11-21T18:47:49","modified_gmt":"2014-11-22T01:47:49","slug":"short-eared-owl-in-flight-with-prey-in-silhouette","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/21\/short-eared-owl-in-flight-with-prey-in-silhouette\/","title":{"rendered":"Short-eared Owl In Flight (with prey in silhouette)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Photographing Short-eared Owls in flight with naturally obtained (not baited)\u00a0prey in a wild setting is near the pinnacle of my bird photography aspirations.\u00a0 Thankfully I’ve had that opportunity several times and I’ll be forever grateful.<\/p>\n

I’ve posted another, somewhat\u00a0similar image of this owl previously.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"short-eared<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1\/1000, f\/6.3, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I photographed this male several years ago at Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in southwest Montana.\u00a0 The prey, a vole, is in near-\u00a0silhouette, shaded as it is\u00a0by the\u00a0owls wings as they dip toward the sun.\u00a0 He was delivering breakfast to his mate and two\u00a0chicks at the base of a sagebrush adjacent to a road.\u00a0 Despite the fact that there were many hundreds of acres of suitable and remote nesting habitat available, these birds chose their nest site very\u00a0close to predictable intermittent traffic\u00a0so they became quite acclimated to vehicles.\u00a0 I always photographed these birds from inside my pickup and\u00a0never approached the nest or noticed signs that they were disturbed by my presence.<\/p>\n

I’ve always wondered if their choice of nest site near a road was deliberate.\u00a0 The chicks of these ground-nesting\u00a0owls would be extremely vulnerable to\u00a0the coyotes that are so common in the valley but these coyotes are very shy of people and vehicles and they seldom come close to roads.\u00a0 Who knows…<\/p>\n

This is one of the few times I had fairly decent light for the owls.\u00a0 Even though the male was hunting in daytime it was usually cloudy so\u00a0typically I was shooting at significantly higher ISO’s.\u00a0\u00a0 Here the background is sagebrush flats at the base of a mountain, in shade at top but in full sun at bottom.<\/p>\n

The background color\u00a0in this image\u00a0will now provide visual meaning for me when I think of Zane Grey’s\u00a0classic western\u00a0novel, “Riders of the Purple Sage”.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – Sorry about the very late post today.\u00a0 It’s been a day of unpleasant technical issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photographing Short-eared Owls in flight with naturally obtained (not baited) prey in a wild setting is near the pinnacle of my bird photography aspirations. Thankfully I’ve had that opportunity several times and I’ll be forever grateful.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28042,"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":[334,360,356],"tags":[35,146,187,256,263,279,315],"class_list":["post-28037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge-favorite-locations","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-flight","tag-iso","tag-prey","tag-red-rock-lakes-national-wildlife-refuge","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-vole"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/short-eared-owl-7513c-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7id","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28037","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=28037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}