I’m quite pleased to have gotten this. I was up yesterday at first light, not exactly intentionally, but used the opportunity to watch for duck and geese raids on the pond edge. Instead, I realized I was hearing the juvie barred owl (Strix varia) calls from right in the backyard again, so I gathered the long lens and tripod and went out looking.
While two were in evidence from the calls, I only saw one, and that one was flitting between perches a little anxiously – perhaps because of my presence, perhaps not, I can’t be sure. I was locked in on it just barely appearing from behind a trunk, terrible conditions, when it left that perch and took this one. A small movement of the tripod gave me a clear view – headphones are recommended for the faint calls:
It was just a week ago when I considered myself incredibly lucky to get the siblings preening and hanging around right out back, and now I snag one in daylight. Even better, I’ve now uploaded two videos in sub-two-minute, TikTok-attention-span lengths! I wouldn’t count on this becoming a habit, though…
I attacked the audio to see if I could isolate those calls a bit better, and it wasn’t too hard to get it to this point; the calls are very high-pitched while most background noise is pretty low, which is why low-pass filters are common. I simply wiped out everything below a certain frequency threshold, but don’t ask me what that was since I didn’t take notes. Enhancing it further is presently beyond my skills, since the frequencies of the calls are varied and overlapping other bird calls. I made an attempt to drop the pitch as well, simply to get it into the range The Girlfriend can hear, but this didn’t work well enough.
Still, I’ll be happy to continue this trend as long as I can.