{"id":49468,"date":"2017-06-27T05:06:27","date_gmt":"2017-06-27T11:06:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=49468"},"modified":"2017-06-27T05:40:08","modified_gmt":"2017-06-27T11:40:08","slug":"burrowing-owl-feeding-frenzy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/06\/27\/burrowing-owl-feeding-frenzy\/","title":{"rendered":"Burrowing Owl Feeding Frenzy"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can’t imagine how frenzied these poor parents are as they try to keep this many chicks fed, fat and happy.<\/p>\n

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

I’ve been watching this Burrowing Owl nest entrance for weeks now but it’s quite a distance from the road and I seldom like the aesthetics of burrow mounds anyway\u00a0so I’ve mostly only been watching the two adults through my lens. But recently the chicks have ventured out and there’s a\u00a0passel of those cute little guys so two days ago I started taking some photos.<\/p>\n

At first\u00a0I thought there was “only” eight of them and for a couple of seconds they all had their eye on me when I first pulled up on the road about 100 yards away. But there was another one out of frame to the left and when that bird spotted a parent coming in with food…<\/p>\n

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

it ran quickly up and joined the rest of the group so now I knew there are at least<\/em> nine of them (the newcomer is the one in the middle still running through the crowd).<\/p>\n

When the parent with food (an insect I believe) arrived a few seconds later\u00a0all hell broke loose.<\/p>\n

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

Talk about a feeding frenzy over one little morsel of food!<\/p>\n

The adult that flew in\u00a0is the bird on the far left (the one with its eyes closed for obvious reasons). It has apparently just dropped the insect and the chicks are going nuts as they compete for the small bit of food. But one of the youngsters apparently put such tawdry behavior\u00a0beneath “him” and…<\/p>\n

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

a different crop of the same image shows him on the right staying aloof from the crowd and\u00a0seeming to look on disdainfully at the behavior of his siblings.<\/p>\n

Clutch size for Burrowing Owls can be as many as a dozen eggs and that makes me wonder if any other raptor lays that many eggs or if this species holds the raptor record (I tried to research that question but never came up with a definitive answer).<\/p>\n

Either way the amount of work involved for the parents as they try to keep so many youngsters fed for many weeks\u00a0must be truly overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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I can’t imagine how frenzied these poor parents are as they try to keep this many chicks fed, fat and happy.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49470,"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":[334,365,392,391],"tags":[510,2233,62,740,1318,3431,228,311],"class_list":["post-49468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","category-feeding-bird-behaviors","category-nesting-and-mating","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-burrow","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-chicks","tag-clutch-size","tag-feeding-frenzy","tag-nest","tag-utah-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/burrowing-owl-0227-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-cRS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49468","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=49468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}