Tag Archives: Great Horned Owls

Slowing Down the Days

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WesternTanager3910Western Tanager                                 click to enlarge

Not quite yet. It’s not quite Spring enough and certainly too soon for Summer but it’s starting. The birds are coming back. We tell time here by when certain birds return, it’s one of  the ways we make the year last longer. If you’re waiting for something to arrive it makes time slow down but the trick is you have something else lined up to wait for when you finally get what you’ve been waiting for in the first place. If you don’t then time grabs the bit between its teeth and races hell-for-leather forward and before you know it its way too late. You’ve lost a whole month or even a year or if you’re not really careful a whole damn life. We don’t want to lose a second, let alone a whole life, so our waiting calendar is pretty full.

Back in February the bluebirds arrived, then Robins, some people say the Robins don’t leave but I can tell you they avoid the high country until it warms up some. The Camp Robbers or Clark’s Nutcracker have been here all winter. They moved on down to get out of the miserable weather above the tree-line in December. We’re waiting for them to go back home. Magpies are another year-round bird here. We’re just waiting for them to do something different. Stellar Jays head downhill when the weather gets bad but they’ve started returning now, so all’s well with them.

Golden eagles are hanging out more on the cliff face behind the house and the Great horned owls have started nesting. There are a pair of Redtail hawks checking out the nest on the road to the cement plant so maybe we get to wait to see what happens there. And one of the big arrivals that screams out Spring, is the return of the Willox St. ospreys and they’re back. I saw the female sitting on the nest yesterday and the male perched nearby guarding her. Now we can wait for this year’s chicks to arrive. That cements Spring firmly in place. The world is becoming right again.

The glitterati of the bird world hasn’t shown up yet but that’s what happens when you wait. You gotta wait. We’re talking hummingbirds in all their various flavors and one of my personal superstars the Western Tanager pictured above. I’ve got time slowed down to just over twice its normal speed which is pretty good actually. There’s a line in an old song about going so fast that telephone poles going by looked like a picket fence. It used to be that days were the telephone poles, now it’s years that are the telephone poles. I’m actively considering adding waiting for the coming of free-range penguins to my wait list. That ought to slow things down pretty good.

Cemetery Owl

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CemeteryOwl0899click to enlarge

This spring I got to spend some quality time in our cemetery. There is an old elm tree in this cemetery that has hosted a family of Great Horned Owls every year for the last 27 years. The nest itself is in a crotch of the tree formed by three great trunks that thrust upward forming a pocket where the nest is placed about twenty feet off the ground and at first glance looks to be the most unlikely of places for a nest. The tree is also located right at the junction of several of the cemetery roads which is one of the most traveled parts of the cemetery. This doesn’t seem to bother the owl parents, I guess after 27 years you’d move if it did. It could be they got a really good deal on their lease and so, why change.

Each year the parents produce from one to three owlets and this year there were two. Some of the very early observers of the nest thought they saw a third but if so it didn’t make it. The female lays her eggs a few days apart so that as the owlets develop they are different sizes and the larger one gets to leave the nest first. They don’t go far however, primarily because they can’t really fly yet and still need to be fed.

One of the traits that became apparent with the siblings was that after the largest left the nest and the smaller one was alone they seemed to really miss each other, calling back and forth constantly and when the youngest and smallest finally got out of the nest the first thing that happened was a huge family reunion with lots of snuggling, feather arranging, bill clacking and affection. There were lots of oooohs and ahhhhs from the watchers below. It seems we are never too far from our Disney upbringing.

Prior to their leaving the nest there were lots of opportunities to photograph the adult and the two chicks but that changed as soon as they were out of the nest. They could now climb up into the branches where newly sprouted leaves partially concealed them and mom didn’t come back to the tree until much later in the day when it was too dark to shoot. So it was kind of bittersweet when they grew to this stage. The image above was the last taken of the smallest owlet. I had stayed later than usual because I had the feeling I wouldn’t be seeing them again or if I did I wouldn’t have the opportunities to photograph them that I had earlier and she made it worthwhile for me, posing, giving me lots of attitude and generally looking very determined. She had been in this nest since late February and it was time to get out. It seems to prove that for every ending there is a beginning. Like Mr. Rodgers used to say “and that’s alright”.

Have Some Nice Rabbit Ear, M’Dear

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GHOwlRabbitEar3520click to see larger version

A few seasons ago I was fortunate (read really lucky) to find an open Great Horned Owls nest that was mostly unobstructed by branches, leaves or other things put there by the photo gods to make a photographers’ life miserable. The owlets are good-sized by now, it is early April, and they still need food to be brought in by their Mother. She works hard for her living (my apologies to Ms. Summers) and brings a variety of offerings to the nest. This morning they were extremely lucky because she brought in a nice fat rabbit. Their usual fare is mice or voles, sometimes a snake and on the rarest of occasions a small peasant child. No wait, I made that up, this was supposed to be the April 1st posting.  She is very careful around the young ones and feeds them in a delicate almost refined manner. Not like the hawks and Eagles which look like they used a chainsaw to prepare their prey. The young however aren’t quite as refined and will grab a portion like this and force the whole thing down their gullet in one big gulp. It doesn’t take long for the rabbit to be totally consumed and after the owlets have stuffed themselves silly they settle down for a nap. It isn’t long before they’re up and at ’em again but Mother is done for the day. They’ll have to make due with whatever leftovers they find around the nest because she isn’t leaving again until dark.