his gift to me in his will that allowed me to purchase my expensive\u00a0500mm lens<\/a> and get into bird photography seriously. Without that gift it never would have happened and Ken knew how frustrated I was trying to photograph the Great Horned Owls that have been resident on the farm\u00a0for many years\u00a0with my much smaller and cheaper lens.<\/p>\nAs is my habit when I’m there on that particular morning I got up before sunrise so I could check the old abandoned\u00a0granaries west of the house for the owls.\u00a0Occasionally I\u00a0would find one of the adults perched\u00a0in one of the auger cutouts in\u00a0a granary in warm light. I love the combination of warm light, old wood and owls!<\/p>\n
On this morning I couldn’t find any adults but I was wonderfully surprised to find a recently fledged youngster on a very unexpected perch.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/great-horned-owl-1882b-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"great-horned-owl-1882b-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\n
1\/640, f\/8. ISO 500, Canon 40D, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4 Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\nIt was a rusty and very old farm machinery wheel,\u00a0probably for a tractor (those huge cleats are meant to dig into the soil for traction). The sun had risen only seconds before and hadn’t even reached most of the wheel yet (it was 5:39 AM). The young owl was often sleeping with both eyes closed but ‘he’ knew I was there (shooting from a tripod which is unusual for me) so occasionally he would open one eye to make sure I wasn’t up to no good. He has blood on one of his toes, undoubtedly from\u00a0one of the\u00a0gophers (Richardson’s Ground Squirrels) that are so abundant in the\u00a0area and that adult owls feed to their youngsters.<\/p>\n
Both the tractor wheel and the old granary behind it would have originated with my grandpa Dudley in about 1930 when he bought the farm on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. He actually broke some of the land and it’s our suspicion that this wheel came from the\u00a0tractor he\u00a0used\u00a0to break it. Breaking\u00a0virgin\u00a0grassland\u00a0is\u00a0infinitely more difficult than plowing land that’s already been farmed and that would explain the massive cleats on the rear powered wheel. There’s gobs of old equipment like this on the farm and none of us today know for sure what some of it was used for.<\/p>\n
So, a rusty old metal tractor wheel used by my grandfather, a granary that he built 85 years ago\u00a0and\u00a0the lens I used to take the photo of one of the beloved farm owls\u00a0which was\u00a0provided by my\u00a0deceased\u00a0cousin\u00a0and best friend Ken Dudley – that’s nostalgia in my book.<\/p>\n
Ron<\/p>\n
Note: Today’s post is\u00a0the 2422nd edition of Feathered Photography and I posted this photo in edition\u00a0#23, on December 10, 2010 so I’m relatively confident that\u00a0most current readers have never seen it.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This image is dripping with nostalgia for me so I hope you’ll allow me to fill in a little of the backstory.<\/p>\n
Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65038,"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":[334,361,2781,1493],"tags":[2608,547,481,145,159,220,4271,4269,4270],"class_list":["post-65037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-family-farm-in-northwest-montana","category-long-eared-owls","category-montana-favorite-locations","tag-blackfeet-indian-reservation","tag-bubo-virginianus","tag-chick","tag-fledgling","tag-great-horned-owl","tag-montana-2","tag-nostalgia","tag-old-granary","tag-old-metal-tractor-wheel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/great-horned-owl-1882b-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-gUZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65037","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=65037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}