{"id":54475,"date":"2017-12-11T04:59:46","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T11:59:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=54475"},"modified":"2017-12-11T05:50:31","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T12:50:31","slug":"the-longest-great-horned-owl-ear-tufts-ive-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/11\/the-longest-great-horned-owl-ear-tufts-ive-seen\/","title":{"rendered":"The Longest Great Horned Owl Ear Tufts I’ve Seen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Occasionally physical variations in birds cause me to do a double-take. That’s exactly what happened yesterday morning with a Great Horned Owl in Box Elder County and in this case it was because of the length of its ear tufts (“horns”).<\/p>\n

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1\/400, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4\u00a0Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve photographed many Great Horned Owls over they years and virtually all of them, as adults, have ear tufts much like these. This is a mated pair that had been producing offspring on our Montana family farm for years. The larger female is on the right, the male on the left. Their ear tufts are about the length I expect to see in this species\u00a0when erected<\/em>. They’re also roughly the same length as the tufts\u00a0of all the other adult GHOW’s I’ve seen and\/or photographed, mostly in Utah and Montana.<\/p>\n

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1\/2000, f\/7.1, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM, extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s another Montana\u00a0adult Great Horned Owl with its ear tufts erected (this bird is yawning).<\/p>\n

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Sorry, I couldn’t readily find the image techs on this image<\/em><\/p>\n

And here’s one photographed in Utah.<\/p>\n

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

But yesterday morning this bird (in truly dismal light)\u00a0gave me a bit of a start. Its ear tufts seemed so long that in all honesty I wondered for a moment if the owl might be some sort of weird variation of a Long-eared Owl, even though it’s clearly a GHOW. I took tight shots of\u00a0it (this one is full frame) partly because I was so enchanted by the length of\u00a0those ear tufts.<\/p>\n

I’m not claiming this bird is necessarily\u00a0unique because I’ve seen a few\u00a0photos of GHOW’s taken by others where the tufts are\u00a0almost this long. But only “almost” and this bird was a first for me so it got me to thinking about why there can apparently <\/em>be so much variation in adult\u00a0GHOW ear tuft length.<\/p>\n

Variation (in size,\u00a0shape, color and everything else you can imagine)\u00a0occurs in all genetically controlled traits, including ear tuft length – after all, variation\u00a0is one of\u00a0the primary fuels of evolution by natural selection. But most of those variations\u00a0or differences\u00a0are\u00a0relatively\u00a0small (though there is a bell curve involved) and we usually don’t even notice them. But this size difference seems pretty significant, at least to my untrained eye.<\/p>\n

At first I wondered if it could be a regional difference.\u00a0GHOW’s are non-migratory which might make regional differences more likely to develop\u00a0but this\u00a0bird was photographed here in Utah where I’ve photographed many others with\u00a0more typically\u00a0sized ear tufts. And I’ve never seen this exaggerated trait elsewhere\u00a0where I photograph in the west either.<\/p>\n

Do any of my readers in other parts of North America see GHOW’s with ear tufts this long? Or are they really not\u00a0unusually long at all and it’s just something I’m imagining?<\/p>\n

If so I’ll be\u00a0embarrassed for\u00a0bringing it up but in the end I had to ask anyway.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – Normally I would never approach an owl this closely (like I said, the image is full frame). But this bird was in the deep shade at the peak of the building and I didn’t even know it was there, only a few feet away, before I had stopped my pickup and turned off the engine for reasons unrelated to the bird. <\/em><\/p>\n

Mia had to pee!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Occasionally physical variations in birds cause me to do a double-take. That’s exactly what happened yesterday morning with a Great Horned Owl in Box Elder County and in this case it was because of the length of its ear tufts (“horns”).<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":54476,"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":[3,5,334,361,405],"tags":[547,3724,127,159,220,3248,3725,311,3726],"class_list":["post-54475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-bird-oddities","category-birds","category-family-farm-in-northwest-montana","category-great-horned-owls-owls","tag-bubo-virginianus","tag-ear-tuft-length","tag-evolution","tag-great-horned-owl","tag-montana-2","tag-natural-selection","tag-unusually-long-ear-tufts","tag-utah-2","tag-variation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/great-horned-owl-1767c-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-eaD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54475","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=54475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}