Tag: flight

Ferruginous Hawks of Utah’s West Desert

The Ferruginous Hawk is a strikingly handsome raptor with its stocky build, white underparts and rufous coloration.  It is the largest North American hawk and has several distinctive features including the fact that its legs are feathered all the way down to the feet.  The Rough-legged Hawk is the only other hawk on this continent to share this trait.  I’ve had a devil of a time getting many photos of this species that I like.  For me they’ve been difficult to find in the first place and then there’s the issue of getting near enough to them for quality images as they generally don’t allow a close approach.  My best luck with the species has been in the foothills of Utah’s west desert mountain ranges.       1/1250, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc I found this bird earlier this week and spent quite a while “sneaking” up on it very slowly in my pickup.    I ended up getting reasonably close before it  flew off.  The hawk is relaxed enough with me in its presence to perform a nice wing stretch.       1/1000, f/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc These birds tend to hunt high off the ground and no matter how slowly I try to approach them while they’re in the air they usually maintain a minimum distance from my truck that is too far away for good photographs.   Very occasionally however one will apparently become curious about me and fly in close – always with its eye on me and not on any potential prey on the ground.  …

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Barn Owl in Flight – Finally Again!

It’s been over four years since I’ve been able to get flight shots of Barn Owls and it’s been a very long wait.   Typically Barn Owls hunt only at night but during the cruel winter of 2008 a few of them were forced to hunt in the morning hours just to survive and I was able to get quite a few nice shots of them in flight.  I haven’t seen them hunt in daylight since then, until just recently when I’ve discovered one individual that has been doing it regularly.    1/800, f/6.3, ISO 500 So far Mia and I have had two chances with this bird.  It was flying along the side of the road so I had to speed up to get in front of the owl then quickly turn around so I could photograph it as it flew toward us with the light at the best angle.   This owl was flying very fast toward an apparent destination (rather than hunting) so we’d get a few shots off as it passed by very quickly.     1/640, f/6.3, ISO 500 Then I’d very quickly turn around, race up the road to get ahead of the owl, turn around again and fire away as the bird flew by.     1/800, f/6.3, ISO 500 I was able to do that three times before I ran out of road.  Very exciting!      1/800, f/5.6, ISO 640 Then a few days later, as we were returning from a morning of photographing other birds after clouds had moved in and we…

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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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Barn Owls in Flight

Flight shots of Barn Owls are very difficult to get because these birds are almost strictly nocturnal and typically fly and hunt only at night.  Photographing birds in flight in the dark or very low light is virtually impossible without using artificial lighting methods which I will not do for ethical reasons. Barn Owl in flight during in full daylight   I had never even seen a Barn Owl in flight until the winter of 2007-08.  That unusually frigid winter began early and brought more snow than usual to the valleys of Utah.  Suddenly, during January and much of February, Barn Owls were hunting the marshes close to the Great Salt Lake during daytime – sometimes until 10 or 11 AM.  Their usual strategy was to hunt for voles (very similar to mice) along the edges of Phragmites growth in the wetlands.  Typically it was very cold on those mornings – often between 0 and +20 degrees Farenheit which made it very uncomfortable standing outside in front of a tripod mounted camera for hours on end!  I very nearly lost some digits to frostbite many times but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.    Barn Owl hunting voles along frosty Phragmites edges I usually preferred to get Phragmites in the backgrounds of my flight shots if possible because they make such a nice backdrop.  In the photo above, there had been heavy fog with sub freezing temperatures so literally everything was covered with a heavy coating of frost.  A magical setting.        Barn Owl skimming Phragmites in background Sometimes the…

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