Handedness in Short-eared Owls

Last summer Mia and I spent four days photographing a family of Short-eared Owls in Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.  There were two baby owls in a nest under a sagebrush guarded over constantly by the female while the male hunted and brought in food.   That food in every instance that we saw was a vole (mouse-like rodent).  Many of the photos I took were of the male in flight, returning to the area of the nest with a vole in his talons. Male with vole It wasn’t until I returned home and began processing the images that I began to notice that the male always seemed to carry the vole in its left foot.  This piqued my curiosity about something I’d never considered – do some birds show “handedness” – the preference of using one limb as opposed to the other?  Could this male owl, or perhaps all Short-eared Owls, be left-“handed”?   Once again, carrying the vole in the left foot So I decided to do an inventory of my images of these birds to see what would turn up.  After culling my photos of these owls from this trip I had 271 photos to go through.  Most of those were flight shots of the male and in more than half of them he was carrying a vole.  My goal was to try to determine how many “sorties” he made with a vole that I had photographed (I often got multiple shots of the male with the same vole in the same sortie) and determine what percentage of the time he…

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