![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/short-eared-owl-1254-ron-dudley.jpg\" "\\"short-eared-owl-1254-ron-dudley\\"")
<\/p>\nI’ve seen individual “shorty” chicks a few times in the past but I believe this was the one and only time I’ve photographed two recently fledged siblings together.<\/p>\n
This photo is a bit of a change of pace for me. Usually my birds are fairly large in the frame but these youngsters were several feet apart so I used my smaller zoom lens in order to include them both in the shot. As a result each bird is small in the fame but I’ve tried to partially compensate for that by making the image larger than usual – 1100 pixels on the long side rather than my typical 900 pixels.<\/p>\n
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1\/640, f\/8, ISO 400, Canon 7D, Canon EF 100-400mm f\/4.5-5.6L IS II USM @153mm, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n I found them in late May several years ago next to a fairly remote but paved road in northern Utah. It was a cool spring morning and they appeared to have come out of the dense grass next to the road in order to enjoy the warming rays of the rising sun with one perched on top of a dried tumbleweed and its sibling perched on a dirt mound several feet away.<\/p>\n I was struck by their differences in both appearance and behavior. The overall color of the bird on the right was significantly darker than its sibling, especially its face but elsewhere too. And the darker sibling spent much more time parallaxing me and my pickup than the other bird did which suggested to me that it was the younger of the two siblings.<\/p>\n With them both so close to the road I was very concerned about their safety so I struggled with trying to decide if I should try to force them back into the cover of the thick grass. Or not. But it was early morning, there was almost no traffic on the remote road, both birds seemed content where they were and I’m always reluctant to stress birds (especially when they’re so young) so in the end I let them be and continued down the road to look for more birds. When I returned later that morning they were gone.<\/p>\n I’ll admit to being extremely relieved to not find them as road kill. A local rancher once told me “We hit owls all the time on that road”. If I had found one or both birds dead on the road when I came back it would have been a very long drive home…<\/p>\n My timing of posting recently fledged birds in winter may seem a little strange to my readers but our dreary cold weather with even more snow in the forecast made me yearn for the color green and other signs of warmth, clean air and springtime.<\/p>\n Owl chicks scratch that itch.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve seen individual “shorty” chicks a few times in the past but I believe this was the one and only time I’ve photographed two recently fledged siblings together.<\/p>\n