{"id":40462,"date":"2016-06-30T05:49:28","date_gmt":"2016-06-30T11:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=40462"},"modified":"2016-06-30T05:49:28","modified_gmt":"2016-06-30T11:49:28","slug":"young-short-eared-owl-learning-to-hunt-from-perches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/30\/young-short-eared-owl-learning-to-hunt-from-perches\/","title":{"rendered":"Young Short-eared Owl Learning To Hunt From Perches"},"content":{"rendered":"

Short-eared Owls\u00a0often hunt from perches instead of on the wing and it’s a technique that must be learned.<\/p>\n

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

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

I spent considerable time with this youngster six days ago in northern Utah as it was learning how to locate prey (probably voles) near its fence post perch.<\/p>\n

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

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

This species uses both visual and acoustic cues to locate prey but they typically rely primarily on sound and this bird was doing a lot of head bobbing and parallaxing as it attempted to determine the source of sounds it would occasionally hear in the nearby\u00a0vegetation.<\/p>\n

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

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Its concentration was pretty intense and it would often…<\/p>\n

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

1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

stare at a particular spot for some time.<\/p>\n

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

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

When it did the owl would often twist and rotate\u00a0its head – a technique that allows its asymmetrical ears to hone in on the source of the sound it was hearing.<\/p>\n

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

1\/3200, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

At times this behavior gave me some interesting poses.<\/p>\n

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

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

At one point its head gyrations apparently caused the bird to lose its balance on the post but it quickly recovered and continued to hunt.<\/p>\n

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

1\/2500, f\/7.1, ISO 500, Canon 7D Mark II,<\/em> Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS II USM + 1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

But the owl never did go after prey from this perch (possibly because it could never see the sources of the sounds it heard in the tall vegetation) and eventually it flew off to another fence post to practice some more.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty sure this very young bird was still being fed by its parents (at least occasionally)\u00a0so at this point it probably\u00a0didn’t need to rely on its own hunting skills for food. There was an adult male hunting in the area and whenever he would come in fairly close this juvenile would beg for food by calling out to him.<\/p>\n

Many buteos also hunt from elevated perches (Red-tailed Hawks for example) but I’ve noticed a significant difference in their technique as compared to Short-eared Owls. The buteos typically prefer to hunt from\u00a0high perches like power poles, tall trees\u00a0and cliffs while these owls usually perch-hunt from low perches, especially fence posts. I suspect that behavioral difference is\u00a0because\u00a0buteos rely primarily on visual cues to locate prey while these owls depend much more on sounds.<\/p>\n

Close proximity to prey items\u00a0is particularly important when you need to hear them in order to locate them.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

Short-eared Owls often hunt from perches instead of on the wing and it’s a technique that must be learned.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":40469,"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":[334,356],"tags":[35,3005,178,3004,2371,256,279],"class_list":["post-40462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-short-eared-owls","tag-asio-flammeus","tag-asymmetrical-ears","tag-hunting","tag-learning-to-hunt","tag-parallaxing","tag-prey","tag-short-eared-owl"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/short-eared-owl-4024-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-awC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40462","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=40462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40462\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}