{"id":98888,"date":"2021-06-03T05:20:55","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T11:20:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=98888"},"modified":"2021-06-03T07:17:34","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T13:17:34","slug":"an-owl-a-willet-a-coincidence-and-the-end-of-a-very-long-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/06\/03\/an-owl-a-willet-a-coincidence-and-the-end-of-a-very-long-story\/","title":{"rendered":"An Owl, A Willet, A Coincidence And The End Of A Very Long Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

A five year old story comes to its final conclusion. At least I hope it’s final.<\/p>\n

It’s been almost a year since I took any decent photos of a Short-eared Owl and that owl was perched on a speed limit sign so calling those images “decent” is a stretch. In many areas of northern Utah SEOW’s used to be fairly common during the breeding season but now I very rarely see them. They’re known to be a nomadic species but I’ve still been very concerned about them.<\/p>\n

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But six days ago I finally found one. When I pulled up on ‘him’ he had a vole in his talons which he gobbled down in one gulp soon after I got him in my viewfinder. I wasn’t very close to him but dang, was I ever glad to see him.<\/p>\n

I had just begun my long drive home that morning when I found the owl but a few minutes later and just up the road from where I found him I spotted…<\/p>\n

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this Willet on a large boulder. The Willet was on the ‘wrong’ side of the road and it was back-lit but I turned around for it anyway, just in case I got lucky with a takeoff or flight shot. I got as close to the Willet as I could, using a large bush on the side of the road as “cover” for my pickup. It makes birds less nervous if there’s a physical obstruction between them and me. But the Willet was too strongly backlit to get any photos I like and it didn’t take off while I was there. Here he’s only moving from one part of the rock to another..<\/p>\n

OK, at this point I need to remind readers of a little history. It’ll be old news for regular followers of Feathered Photography but not everyone who reads my blog is a regular follower.<\/p>\n

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On June 19, 2016 Mia and I rescued this fledgling Short-eared Owl that was hung up on a barbed wire fence. Mia first spotted one of the youngster’s parents perched on a bush that in this photo is just a few feet out of frame to the right and then we found this poor little guy hanging pitifully from the barbed wire. I couldn’t get him off the wire without further injuring his left wing so reluctantly I cut it with some wire cutters I had in my pickup.<\/p>\n

Before we left to area to deliver the young owl to rehab (he’s now an education bird named Galileo<\/a><\/span><\/span>) I told the nearest rancher I could find that I’d cut the fence and offered to pay for repairs. He was incredulous that I’d cut the fence. When I told him what I’d done his very words were “You cut the fence for an owl? We hit them on the road all the time.”. He acted like me cutting the fence was the end of the world and that I’d done it for no good reason.<\/p>\n

So of course I figured the fence would be repaired almost immediately since it’s that important. But I’ve checked that fence almost weekly for nearly five years and it had never been fixed.<\/p>\n

Here’s where the coincidence comes in. By chance it just so happened that the bush I sneaked up behind to photograph the Willet was the same bush that Galileo’s upset parent was perched in when we found him five years earlier. While I was pulled up on the Willet I glanced back at the fence behind me and miracle of miracles it had finally.<\/p>\n

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been repaired. After five long years of me stressing about that fence and the repair bill that might be sent to me it was finally fixed. You can see the repair on the second wire strand from the top. It must have taken the rancher all of 15 minutes to fix it, tops.<\/p>\n

All this leaves me wondering, if cutting the wire was such a big damned deal why did it take them five years to fix it? I also wonder if they’ll send me a repair bill since I offered to pay for it and left my contact info with the rancher I talked to. Time will tell I guess.<\/p>\n

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I’ll close with a bird-spotting challenge for my readers. There’s a bird in the photo above, do you see it?<\/p>\n

If you squint while looking closely you should be able to see the Willet I’d been photographing still on the large boulder at upper right. And yes, it’s the same boulder we see at the upper left in the previous photo of Galileo hanging on the fence.<\/p>\n

The perspective looks very different because I took the last photo with my cell phone and I was shooting at a different angle.<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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

A five year old story comes to its final conclusion.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98891,"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":[334,8,16,356],"tags":[24,2455,5716,145,279,311,327],"class_list":["post-98888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-photography-ethics","category-short-eared-owls","tag-adult","tag-barbed-wire-fence","tag-cutting-fence","tag-fledgling","tag-short-eared-owl","tag-utah-2","tag-willet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/short-eared-owl-8820-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-pIY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98888","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=98888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98888\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}