{"id":32376,"date":"2015-06-29T04:40:31","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T10:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=32376"},"modified":"2015-06-29T04:40:31","modified_gmt":"2015-06-29T10:40:31","slug":"the-impressively-long-legged-burrowing-owl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2015\/06\/29\/the-impressively-long-legged-burrowing-owl\/","title":{"rendered":"The Impressively Long-legged Burrowing Owl"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll have to ponder it for a while but this may turn out to be one of my three favorite Burrowing Owl images of all time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing1\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II, Canon EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, canvas added for composition,\u00a0not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

This is one of the juvenile Burrowing Owls I photographed a week ago in Box Elder County. The unusually long legs of the species are an adaptation to their ground-dwelling lifestyle and that extreme length (for an owl)\u00a0became even more apparent\u00a0with this take off pose.<\/p>\n

Every time I look at this\u00a0photo my eyes go to those legs but a variety of other features of the image also appeal to me\u00a0including the twisting, leaning take-off posture, the wing position, the head turn with good light on the face, the rustic weather-beaten\u00a0fence post perch and the\u00a0sharpness of the\u00a0bird including the wings. The combination of a high shutter speed and a pose that put the entire length of the wings in almost the same plane as the body of the bird allowed the wings to be sharper than I usually expect to get in this type of shot and I like that.<\/p>\n

Burrowing Owls seem to have had a banner nesting season this year as I don’t believe I’ve ever seen so many juveniles in some areas of northern Utah. Their numbers have declined drastically in the last 50 years and they’re listed as a Species of Special Concern\u00a0here in Utah and in 7 other western states so I couldn’t be happier about their apparent breeding success.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PS – Just in case anyone is curious about my other two “favorite” Burrowing Owl images I’ve included them below (even though I’ve posted them previously).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"burrowing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

I’ll have to ponder it for a while but this may turn out to be one of my three favorite Burrowing Owl images of all time.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32377,"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":[334,365],"tags":[510,2550,62,105,190,282,758,605],"class_list":["post-32376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-box-elder-county-utah","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-depth-of-field","tag-juvenile","tag-shutter-speed","tag-species-of-special-concern","tag-take-off"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/burrowing-owl-3716-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-8qc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32376","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=32376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32376\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}