{"id":58870,"date":"2018-05-01T05:52:55","date_gmt":"2018-05-01T11:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=58870"},"modified":"2018-05-01T12:04:20","modified_gmt":"2018-05-01T18:04:20","slug":"burrowing-owl-giving-me-a-dubious-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/01\/burrowing-owl-giving-me-a-dubious-look\/","title":{"rendered":"Burrowing Owl Giving Me A Dubious Look"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the same look I’d get from my mother when she caught me in the cookie jar as a little kid. I still<\/em> remember that look.<\/p>\n

For me at least Burrowing Owls have been alarmingly scarce so far this year. I keep thinking I’ll see them in places where they’ve been relatively common in the past but I just don’t and that concerns me. So they’ve been on my mind as of late, thus today’s post – an image taken almost exactly one year ago today on Antelope Island.<\/p>\n

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\"\"1\/1250, f\/5.6, ISO 800, 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 was cloudy when I took the photo and it shows but I still like it. I think the soft, filtered\u00a0light helps to bring out the\u00a0textures and colors of the setting, particularly the subtle purples of the tiny redstem filaree in the grasses below the bird. I also like the framing of the owl between the sharp, tall grasses at left and the soft,\u00a0out of focus ones to the right.\u00a0This little owl was\u00a0obviously suspicious of me and it shows in the look “he’s” giving me – some folks appropriately call that look “stink-eye”.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

My cookie jar reference in the intro to my post is\u00a0genuine. When I was about 5 years old I surreptitiously\u00a0invaded our ceramic cookie jar (fashioned after a fat monk with his hands clasped across his\u00a0ample belly)\u00a0on the back of the kitchen counter\u00a0for the Oreo’s it always contained. Doing so was a major crime in our house and getting caught was truly\u00a0terrifying (my\u00a0mother famously\u00a0had a rubber spatula that she occasionally used for purposes other than cooking…).\u00a0To get to\u00a0it I had to pull out the\u00a0kitchen drawers below the jar and\u00a0use them as a ladder to get up there and because the jar was ceramic replacing the lid was a delicate operation because it made so much noise.\u00a0My mom was definitely tuned in to that distinct\u00a0sound but she was in one of the bedrooms so I\u00a0thought it was perfect timing for my carefully planned\u00a0cookie thief operation.<\/p>\n

But as careful as I tried to be she heard me replace the lid and hollered out from the bedroom “Ronnie, get out of that cookie jar!”. In a panic I jumped down backwards off the counter and caught my chin on the counter going down with my tongue sticking out. My upper front teeth sliced deeply\u00a0into the top of my tongue and I bled like a stuck pig for what seemed like an eternity. One of my distinct visual memories is blood on the floor mixed in with broken Oreos. Even my mom, a nurse, was in a bit of a panic. I remember my tongue being so swollen and painful\u00a0I could hardly eat for days.<\/p>\n

To this day I still have a small flap on the top of my tongue from that incident.<\/p>\n

So yes, my reactions to “the\u00a0look” and to the cookie jar memory are visceral to this day, 66 years down the long and winding\u00a0road.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS –\u00a0Apologies for rambling on like I have but that cookie jar\u00a0memory came so strongly to mind while I was composing this post\u00a0I had to include it.<\/em><\/p>\n

PSS – As an afterthought I decided to add this photo of my mom, taken (I believe) on her graduation from nursing school during WWII\u00a0in Calgary, Alberta.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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

This is the same look I’d get from my mother when she caught me in the cookie jar as a little kid. I still remember that look.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":58873,"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":[3,334,365],"tags":[31,510,62,4010],"class_list":["post-58870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-antelope-island","category-birds","category-burrowing-owls","tag-antelope-island-2","tag-athene-cunicularia","tag-burrowing-owl","tag-oreo-cookies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/burrowing-owl-5302b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-fjw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58870","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=58870"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58870\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}