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1\/400, f\/10, ISO 400, Canon Rebel XTi, Canon EF 500mm f\/4L IS USM + EF 1.4 Extender, not baited, set up or called in<\/em><\/p>\n One evening just before sunset as I roamed the farm with camera in hand I encountered one of the resident Great Horned Owls perched on the back of one of the old grain trucks. I’m not sure of it but I believe this truck was the ’29 Ford originally owned by my grandfather DeVere Dudley when he bought the farm in ’29 or ’30. When I was growing up it was the oldest running vehicle on the farm and we still used it during harvest.<\/p>\n When I was about 10 years old I started driving that decrepit old truck to haul grain from the combines in the fields to the granaries. It was quite the experience for someone that age. Believe me, if you can drive an ancient truck with no synchromesh in the gears through incredibly soft field dirt with a load weighing anywhere from 14,000 to 18,000 lbs.(depending on if it’s wheat or barley) you can drive just about anything. Those memories are seared into my brain so this photo of one of my beloved owls on what is probably that old truck, parked right where Ken parked it before he died, means a lot to me. The grain bins in the background seal the deal.<\/p>\n To make the photo even more meaningful, grandpa Dudley used that truck in the early 30’s to haul the lumber to the farm that he used to build the old granaries that the owls hang out in to this day. The lumber had to be hauled from what we called “across the mountains”, the Kalispell area near Glacier National Park. In those days that trip was quite an ordeal and grandpa made it many times.<\/p>\n Normally the nocturnal farm owls don’t come out of the granaries to hunt gophers until just after sunset but this owl was out early for very good reason.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘She’ had a family to feed.<\/p>\n This photo of her two young chicks was taken on the day before the first photo was taken. The chicks are on the floor of the old granary where they were raised. For decades that granary hadn’t been used by humans for anything other than storing old farm junk but the owls love it despite its messy clutter. That wet spot on the wood in front of the top owl is gopher (Richardson’s Ground Squirrel) blood and body juices.<\/p>\n It’s a messy and even dangerous place to raise a family, especially with all those nails sticking up, but it seems to work just fine for the owls. Both owlets were fledged successfully.<\/p>\n I’ll end with an explanation of why I hesitated for so long to post the first photo. In the original image there was a large and distracting blurry white blob in the background. To this day I don’t know what it was but it drove me nuts so until now I’d never used the photo.<\/p>\n But for this version I cloned the damn thing out. Now I can enjoy the image.<\/p>\n Ron<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Partly for sentimental reasons I’ve wanted to post this first photo to my blog for a long time.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/great-horned-owl-8560-ron-dudley.jpg\")
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