National Bird Day at the Raptor Center

January 5th was National Bird Day but here in the Twin Cities we celebrated on the 6th. The National Bird Day event was held at the Raptor Center and included booths and or presentations from The Raptor Center, the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota, Midwest Avian Adoption and Rescue Services, Chicken Run Rescue, and Audubon Minnesota. There were a lot of things to see and do including displays, information booths, tours, and programs.

I sat in on a couple of the programs. The first was a program from Midwest Avian Adoption and Rescue Services. The program got started late due to some technical difficulties. Fortunately there was a technician available, me. Having set up for many programs and meeting at my day job I was able to get things up and running so that they could pass on a lot of information about the parrot pet trade. I sat out of the next program and spent my time talking to a couple of the other Raptor Center volunteers. I was waiting for the last program which was the All About Owls program from the Raptor Center. I have seen the program before but I love watching the owls and figured that this would be a good opportunity to get some pics.

Since all of the programs through out the day seemed to go late it was after 4:00 when the All About Owls program began. The whole event was supposed to end at 4:00 but quite a few people hung around like I did to see the last program. It was well worth the wait. They began the program by bringing out a great horned owl named Lois.
After giving the audience a bunch of information about great horned owls they gave us a real treat. They gave us a demonstration of great horned owl flight.

I have had great horned owls fly close to me out in the wild but I still find it fascinating how they fly so silently.

The next owl in the program was an eastern screech owl named Otus. Otus is one of two eastern screech owls that the Raptor Center uses as an educational bird. The other screech owl Sqweek is a gray phase instead of a red phase like Otus.The third bird was a barn owl named whisper. Barn owls are no longer found out in the wild in Minnesota. The cold temperatures that we get in the winter months along with the lack of old barns has caused them to depart the state.The final owl in the program was a boreal owl with the very clever name of Boreal. Boreal owls are small secretive owls which live in northern boreal forests. We do have boreal owls in Northern Minnesota but I have not ever had the chance to see one in the wild yet. Maybe I will get lucky at the Sax-Zim Birding Festival next month and get to see a wild boreal. Until that time I will just have to enjoy Boreal and all of the other owls and raptors at the Raptor Center.

Burrowing Owl

On August 6th I received an e-mail from the MOU list server about a group of burrowing owls that had been spotted in southern Minnesota. Burrowing owls are not all that common in Minnesota, the western part of the state is the on the eastern edge of their range, so I was kind of excited about the prospect of going and getting some pics. The only issue was that the location that they were spotted was about 250 miles from home.

It was a nice day and I had plenty of time so I decided to make the trek. On the way down I decided to take the more scenic route instead of taking the freeway. I saw a lot of birds on the trip including red tail hawks, turkey vulture, heron, egret, eastern kingbird, plus lots of sparrows and waterfowl. Most of the time I was on highways with very little shoulders and speed limits of 65mph so I could not really stop for pictures. But when I got on the back roads, close to my destination, I did stop to take a couple of shots.Southern Minnesota is filled with farm fields which are excellent habitat for bug eating raptors like this male american kestrel.The telephone poles frequently had red tail or swainson's hawks, like the one above, perched searching the field for small rodents. After about 5 hours I finally arrived at the soybean field where the owls had been spotted. I did a quick scan and spotted some movement in a single file line of small trees. There were the owls.Since the owls where on private property and a little ways in I got out my tripod and teleconverter so that I could try and get some close ups. Fortunately one of the owls was perched at the top of one of the small trees so I had a pretty unobstructed view. It was a good thing it was a soybean field and not corn. I took a few shots of the perched bird and even got a couple of one in flight.
By this point it was already 2:30pm and I still had a long drive back home. On the way back I took the freeway to save time. The total trip took 9 hours which is a lot of time for about 30 minutes of shooting but it was worth it to get a species that MOU lists as casual in Minnesota.

It's owl a matter of luck

My wife and I have always been big fans of raptors, owls are her particular favorite. In our travels we have seen snowy owls, great grey owls, barred owls, and burrowing owls but up until this year we had never had the luck to see one of the most common North American owls the great horned owl. Then earlier year I was browsing local Internet bird sites and I read about an active great horned owl nest in a nearby park. This was the beginning of a run on great horned owls that we have been fortunate to see since.

I photographed the nest at Woodlake Nature Center almost every day for 2 weeks. It was a great learning experience. I got to witness a lot of great owl behavior including feeding, nest defense from angry crows, and the chick starting to branch. I documented some of this behavior in the first couple of posts of this blog. 1 2 3

Here is another picture that I have not posted yet. The mother left the nest with a large hunk of rabbit in her beak.

So while we were on our annual trip to Yellowstone we noticed several people in the Tower parking lot with spotting scopes pointing across the valley. I began talking to them and asked what they were looking at. They were watching a great horned owls nest in a hollow trunk across the valley. The nest was pretty far away but I wanted to get a picture since it was a different type of nest.
Even with my lens and extender you could barely see the chicks in the nest so I decided to get my scope out and shoot a picture through the scope. Not quite the same quality but at least you can see the eyes of one of the chicks.
The people who I was speaking with told me that there was another great horned nest that was closer and easier to view up in Mammoth by the visitors center. We had heard that great horned owls had been nesting in Mammoth on our previous trips but we have never been able to find them. This year our luck was better. As I was walking in the street behind the residence buildings I spotted an adult great horned

and a large chick in one of the pine trees. I took a couple of shots but the lighting was not very good. Since the only angle you could clearly see the owls was by facing west I figured that I would come back the following morning when the light would be facing the owls instead of behind them.
Unfortunately the next morning was overcast. When we arrived in Mammoth there was already a half dozen photographers set up and an adult was perched next to the nest. I set up my equipment and waited. Eventually we got a few peaks of sunlight so that we could get some shots. Most of the other photographers were disappointed that the owl did not open it's eyes but since I had already gotten some great owl shots at Woodlake I was not too worried about getting the eye shot.
We left Yellowstone the next day and on our way back home stopped at Medicine Lake National Wildlife Refuge. We had planned the side trip to get some shots of waterfowl, particularly eared grebe in breeding plumage. As we pulled into a picnic area in the park a large form soared down from the only large tree around and landed in a small tree to the south east of where we had stopped. From the way it flew I could tell that it was an owl. I moved a bit closer and sure enough it was a great horned owl. I could not help but laugh to myself about the guys futily waiting in Yellowstone for the owl to open it's eyes and us just stumbling into a great horned with it's eyes wide open. Unfortunately the owl was to the southeast of us which put it right into the morning sun. I moved a bit to the west so that I could get better light and as I shot the picture another large form swished by over head.

And a second great horned landed next to the first. I looked over to where the second owl had just took off from and noticed that they had a nest in a tree that was just a little higher then eye level. Peaking out of the nest I spied an owl chick.

Here is a close up of the chick I took a couple pictures of the chick and the adults and then one of the owls began to click it's bill. I knew that I was causing the bird stress so it was time to go. We left the owls alone and went to the other part of the refuge to shoot picture of the waterfowl.





Now that we know what to look for I am hoping that we see great horned owls much more often.

A hard post to make

Thursday the weather cleared up so I decided to go to Wood Lake to check on the owls nest. When I arrived I found that the nest was empty. I could not believe that the owl had matured enough to fly away in just the couple days since I had last saw him. Then I ran into some people who recognized me from all of the times that I had been photographing the owls. They told me that the chick had fallen out of the tree and that the park naturalists had moved it to a basket so that it would not be disturbed by people. They showed me where the basket was and the baby was not looking to good. At this point I thought that it might be dead in the basket but then it moved it's head so I knew that there was still hope.
I returned Friday after work and the basket was gone. I found a park naturalist and asked what had happened. It seems that during the night the chick had passed away. They guess that it had some internal injuries from it's fall and this was the cause of it's death. It is very sad and unfortunate that this owl chick, who had touched a lot of lives at the park, did not survive but that is the way nature is some times. I did get a lot of great shots of the chick and the mother and I plan on posting a tribute or two.

Tomorrow I plan to travel to Crex Meadows in Wisconsin. This will be the first trip to Crex this spring and I hope that we have some good luck. I know the weather is supposed to be great so I should have fun.

Owling part 2

After my initial trip to see the nesting Great Horned Owls at http://www.woodlakenaturecenter.org/ I decided it would be interesting to try and record the progress of the young chick as it continued to mature. So I found a new home for my tripod in my truck and set up camp each day after work in the owls front yard.
For the first couple days I visited from 3pm to 5pm. On those days the mother was no where around and I began to get worried that something might have happened to her. Finally on Friday the 13th I decided to stay a bit later. Around 6:00pm mom finally showed up.



After a bit of preening mom began to rip up a rabbit, which had been in the nest the whole time, and feed the hungry chick. This went on for about 45 minutes. After they finished the meal both mom and the chick cleaned their feathers and then mom took off and perched on a near by branch until it got dark.