Tag: focus sounds

Barn Owl Hunting Adaptations And Techniques

One more Barn Owl post and then I’ll give them a rest for a while. Lately I’ve spent a lot of time watching these birds hunt and I’ve become intrigued by the process and their adaptations for doing so.  Hunting over deep snow presents unique challenges because their prey (typically voles) spends most of their time in tunnels under the surface, so the owls are often hunting by sound alone.  According to Birds of North America Online (out of Cornell) Barn Owls hunt prey by sound more effectively than any other animal ever tested (I’m unsure if this statement takes into account the use of sonar by cetaceans and ultrasonic sounds by bats but BNA seldom gets things like this wrong).    1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in They fly low and slow over the surface while watching and listening but with this much snow they usually locate the voles only by sound.   Notice that they can tuck their legs up into their ventral feathers so far that only the feet are visible.  It’s amazing that they can do so because…      1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in as you can see in this “butt shot” those legs are incredibly long.  This is an adaptation for grasping prey through deep vegetation or snow.  Their claws (nails) are unusually long and sharp and the middle nail has a pectinate inner edge, most likely an adaptation for grasping prey…

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A Northern Harrier Kind Of Morning

Normally I avoid doing back to back posts on the same species but I went out shooting immediately after I published that last post and surprisingly it turned out to be a heckuva harrier morning.  I’ve mentioned  before that I usually have my best luck with harriers in the middle of winter, but yesterday I found two cooperative birds.    1/1600, f/6.3, ISO 500, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc, natural light, not baited, set up or called in This beauty was hunkered down for a break from hunting and let me get surprisingly close.  It was early morning, the light was warm, and the bird posed for me for a long time.  I chose to post this almost direct look from the hawk for a reason – because out of all those images, this one shows the unique harrier facial disc best. A facial disc is a concave arrangement of feathers on the face of some birds (most notably owls) that forms a circular parabaloid that collects sound waves and redirects them toward the ears.  In harriers the disc is less prominent than in owls, but larger in relative size because it extends to the neck, so it is commonly referred to as a facial ruff, rather than a disc.   The large ear openings of harriers are buried in the feathers of the head and can’t be seen.  The angle of the disc or ruff feathers can be adjusted to alter the focal length of the sound waves they’re collecting, which allows the bird to “focus” at different distances – a…

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