Five days ago, as I always do, I stopped at a water source in the west desert I’m very familiar with to look for small birds, invertebrates and maybe even amphibians. I sometimes find songbirds there near the water but you have to look carefully for them so I was looking down near the water for any sign of animal life when I heard a loud crashing sound coming from one of two nearby small trees.
In my peripheral vision I saw something very large come out the tree and almost disappear on the ground in the thick brush next to the tree. At first I couldn’t tell what it was but the crashing noise it made was so loud in the still desert air it sounded like the proverbial bull in a china shop.
The first four photos below are less than tack sharp because everything happened so fast in different places, I barely had time to get the subjects in frame, much less in focus.
The source of the racket was a large female flop-‘eared’ Great Horned Owl. She must have been buried in the middle of the tree, so when she panicked on my approach her wings made a lot of noise against the branches as she came out of the tree.
She was here for less than five seconds and none of my shots of her were very sharp because of the brush in front of her. When she took off she…
landed further away on a large squarish rock. I could tell she was still nervous because she had her ‘horns’ up and she kept twisting her head around as she surveyed her new surroundings.
It didn’t help her nerves when a noisy male American Kestrel gave her grief by repeatedly dive bombing her.
Suddenly I heard another crashing noise coming from the same tree the female owl had come out of.
It was another Great Horned Owl that was significantly darker and smaller than the female. This bird landed…
right next to her on the rock. They’re almost certainly a mated pair, with the darker, smaller owl being the male.
On those rare occasions in the past when I’ve been able to photograph a mated pair of Great Horned Owls together, both birds have always been very close to the same color. So the color differences between these two really stood out to me.
Both birds stayed on the rock for some time but the female seemed more nervous than the male. The male never did erect his ear tufts (horns) and when the female eventually took off away from me, the male…
stayed put. But slowly he appeared to become more agitated, eventually giving me…
what I interpreted as stink eye, including in body posture. I don’t think he was looking directly at me inside my pickup, but he was looking at my pickup and he wasn’t happy.
Well, I can take a hint so I decided to drive on down the road and leave him be. But before I could stow my gear and start my pickup, he took off. I never saw either owl again.
Ron
Note: Great Horned Owls are thought to mate for life (or at least for a long time) but they tend to be solitary except for the breeding season, which is over for this species. So I have to wonder if this male is a young bird still hanging around his mother. Or maybe they’re both young siblings still hanging out together. I dunno…
OTHER USERS BOUGHT THIS!!!
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