{"id":32284,"date":"2015-06-25T06:15:41","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T12:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=32284"},"modified":"2015-06-25T06:52:56","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T12:52:56","slug":"burrowing-owl-take-off-series-and-the-dangers-of-barbed-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/25\/burrowing-owl-take-off-series-and-the-dangers-of-barbed-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"Burrowing Owl Take-off Series And The Dangers Of Barbed Wire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two events yesterday morning made yet another threat\u00a0of barbed wire\u00a0for wildlife\u00a0painfully clear.<\/p>\n

I apologize for three sequential posts on the same species but Burrowing Owls have been my primary subject of late and I like to post current images when I can.\u00a0Besides, I thought this post needed to be timely.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Once again I spent part of the morning in Box Elder County photographing Burrowing Owls. This juvenile (it seems to have an unusual small\u00a0white growth on its lower left leg) was perched on an old, rusty strand of barbed wire stretched in front of a horizontal fence rail when it decided to take off. As I’ve said before they typically launch in the direction their body is facing but that’s unpredictable and this one looked back and then…<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/3200, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

twisted on its perch to take off almost directly toward me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the next frame it gave me a peekaboo look as its foot left the wire…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

and my next shot caught the wings fully extended. I wish I’d had just a tad more shutter speed (like I did in the first two images) to get the ends of the wings sharp\u00a0but when the shadow of the extended wings darkened the\u00a0fence rail\u00a0it also slowed my SS from 1\/3200 to 1\/2500 sec since I shoot in aperture priority. This illustrates the reason why I try to have at least 1\/3200 when I’m photographing these lightning-fast birds at take-off.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/2500, f\/6.3, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I was pleasantly surprised to get one more shot where the face and body of the bird were sharp with it coming toward me. I wish I had little more room at bottom for a more pleasing composition but it just didn’t happen. At least I didn’t clip or cut off any body parts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now may I suggest that you go back and look more carefully at the second image in this series. You’ll notice that when this bird lifted off its right wing came in contact with the upper wire and at least one of its barbs. Anyone with experience with barbed wire knows that it can be nasty stuff and create havoc with animals that come in contact with it. Once it grabs a victim it usually requires a methodical and thoughtful process of extraction – something wildlife is incapable of. Struggling, the typical reaction of animals, just makes it worse. Much worse.<\/p>\n

Thankfully this owl escaped the contact with the wire unscathed but not all of them do (the following two images are disturbing – fair warning).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\"burrowing<\/p>\n

68 minutes after photographing the\u00a0juvenile owl taking off we found another juvenile nearby that wasn’t so lucky. It was hanging from a strand of barbed wire and appeared to have died fairly recently. At the moment this area is teeming with juvenile Burrowing Owls who still have a lot to learn about the dangers of the world and I can’t help but wonder how many more will meet this same fate before they have\u00a0time to wise up a little.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

A large crop of the previous image reveals that the owl’s talons have what appears to be feathers sticking to them. I can only speculate about their origin but it’s my suspicion that the feathers belong to the owl itself – that they may have been scratched out of its own body during its death throes on the wire.<\/p>\n

Mia reported this bird to authorities\u00a0and they have committed to picking up the\u00a0body. There are Greater Sage Grouse and several other species of upland game birds in this area but there are no tags or flags on the fences (that I’m aware of) that are often used to help Sage Grouse and other wildlife avoid the wires. I’m sure they’d\u00a0help Burrowing Owls do the same thing and that step has already been suggested to authorities.<\/p>\n

Sorry to end this post on a bummer but awareness is part of a potential solution so I went with it.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Two events yesterday morning made yet another threat of barbed wire for wildlife painfully clear.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32287,"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":[6,334,365],"tags":[34,510,603,689,62,2544,2543,2542,190,282,605],"class_list":["post-32284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bird-photography-methods","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","tag-aperture-priority","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-barbed-wire","tag-box-elder-county","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-fence-flags","tag-fence-tags","tag-fences","tag-juvenile","tag-shutter-speed","tag-take-off"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/burrowing-owl-4242-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-8oI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32284","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=32284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}