Had a small handful of pics to post, then got a few more yesterday morning (actually, right after the tiger beetle) that were going to go up, but I got busy with some other things. Then last night (which is only a couple hours ago as I type this,) I got more that needed to jump in line. So the next few image posts are going to be in reverse chronological order, but so be it.
In the late morning yesterday, I was hearing the barred owlets (Strix varia) in the backyard, but couldn’t actually lay eyes on them, and you’d understand if you saw the thickness of the canopy, virtually all bald cypress trees. Still, it had been several days since I’d heard them, so not only did this confirm they were still hanging around, but they were still doing their fledgling calls for food too; I wonder if this has the slightest effect now, or if the parents are ignoring them to encourage the owlets to feed on their own.
Then last night, I heard one again, through the window to the office, and you know how faint the sound is, so I figured it was close. I alerted The Girlfriend and we went out with the flashlight, and I pinpointed the sound immediately – one of them, I suspect the youngest, calls a lot and doesn’t seem concerned who hears. We soon spotted it in the tree nearest the office door, about 20 meters or less from the edge of the deck where we stood. While The Girlfriend held the flashlight for focusing, I fired off frames with the 600mm lens and the Vivitar 285 flash. This is full-frame:
I mean, seriously, no complaints, and I was able to lock focus on pretty damn well this time. We go in closer on that same frame for detail:
About two hours before this, the rain had hammered down during a fierce thunderstorm, and some of those residual raindrops can be seen in the feathers if you look closely, above the eyes and along the beak. There’s also the evidence of the downy nest feathers on top of the head, that scruffy look that tells you this one isn’t yet adult. As if the frequent wheezing calls weren’t enough.
The real show, though, comes when I combined eight frames into an animated gif (pronounced, “ZHON-darm“) because this one was looking around enthusiastically, everywhere – I had to wait several times because it had the back of its head to us, even when it was ostensibly facing our way. Video would have been better, but the batteries in the light were getting weak and it would have been poor quality. This is amusing, anyway:
There definitely seemed to be something that grabbed its attention down low to its left (our right,) but it never decided to pounce on it – shame, that might have made an even better sequence. There is a narrow window when I’m most likely to capture such a thing, because right now, this juvie is more concerned with getting fed by the folks than avoiding the nearby humans, and so it doesn’t fly off at our presence – this probably won’t last much longer, and it already seems to avoid me in the daylight. We’ll see, perhaps.
Meanwhile, the same sequence is more of a funky dance when the delay between frames is shortened – the initial animation was with a delay even shorter than this, which is what convinced me you needed to see it faster. Feel free to set it against the music of your choice.
By the way, it was still there when I decided I had enough frames and we let it be. It’s seen and heard us around often enough now that maybe it’ll remain more relaxed about our proximity – it certainly seems to like the backyard well enough, and the cacophony of post-rain frog calls that was going on when I first heard the owl tells me there’s enough food here, not like I needed the confirmation. I’ll keep you posted.