{"id":29214,"date":"2015-01-28T05:14:41","date_gmt":"2015-01-28T12:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=29214"},"modified":"2015-01-28T05:14:41","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T12:14:41","slug":"wintering-burrowing-owl-on-antelope-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/01\/28\/wintering-burrowing-owl-on-antelope-island\/","title":{"rendered":"Wintering Burrowing Owl On Antelope Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

Burrowing Owls are “supposed” to migrate out of Utah during winter but yesterday I photographed one up close on Antelope Island that apparently didn’t read the book.<\/p>\n

All of my field guides (Sibley, National Geographic, Audubon,\u00a0American Museum of Natural History) show Burrowing Owls only as summer residents (breeding range)\u00a0in Utah. Birds of North America Online (BNA) goes into a little more detail, saying that in\u00a0the Great Basin\u00a0Burrowing Owls are mostly migratory but “a small proportion of breeding owls overwinter in their nesting\u00a0area”.<\/p>\n

This bird must be one of those rare exceptions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing1\/400, f\/8, ISO 1250, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM +1.4 tc, canvas added for composition, not baited, set up or called in\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Despite the clouds and fog on the island\u00a0early\u00a0yesterday morning I decided to venture out and try to test my new lens. I had seen this bird twice\u00a0in the last few days but it had always been buried in vegetation so all my photos were garbage\u00a0but this time it was in the open and\u00a0elevated on a small mound.\u00a0Though the bird was obviously sleepy\u00a0it was\u00a0still very alert but it would only open one eye to a slit.<\/p>\n

It was foggy,\u00a0the light was dismal and it was quite cold\u00a0as you can see by the frost on the ground. I was amazed that I got a catch light in the eye because the only\u00a0occasional\u00a0bright spot in the clouds was mostly behind the owl – its light\u00a0must have been reflecting off of my pickup.\u00a0Normally I don’t post banded birds because with few exceptions I prefer there to be no signs of the “hand of man” in my images but I made an exception to document the presence of this owl here in winter. Later I’ll see if an extreme crop of this or other images will allow me to read enough of the band numbers to report them\u00a0to the biologist on the island.\u00a0I know they appreciate feedback like that on these owls that they’ve been banding for several years now and they may (or may not) be especially interested in one that’s overwintering here.<\/p>\n

I know of one other person who has\u00a0seen\u00a0at least one Burrowing Owl on the island this winter.\u00a0Whether it was this one or not, I don’t know.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Burrowing Owls are “supposed” to migrate out of Utah during winter but yesterday I photographed one up close on Antelope Island that apparently didn’t read the book. <\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29215,"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":[3,334,365],"tags":[31,510,1624,62,1484,866,311,855],"class_list":["post-29214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-banded","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-hand-of-man","tag-migration","tag-utah-2","tag-winter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/burrowing-owl-8957-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7Bc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29214","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=29214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}