| Photojournal
- 21
December 2004
Northern
Pygmy-Owl
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Tuesday the 21st of
December was grey like most December days in Vancouver. There
was some holiday or another coming up, so I didn't have to work
and was able to go out to see what I could find. I decided to
head to Maplewood to look for one or both of the Northern Pygmy-owls
that had been reported there for the last few weeks. I had tried
twice before to find these birds, with no luck. I had seen a Northern
Pygmy-owl when I went to Squamish, but that was a high-in-the-tree,
distant sighting. I wanted to find one in good camera range.
Some days things are
just easy. I went into Maplewood, crossed their footbridge, walked
another thirty or forty meters, and there he was, just a few steps
off the path..
"He," naturally,
was another photographer. The interesting thing about this photographer
was not that he was in winter plumage (he assuredly was) but that
he was pointing his camera at a gorgeous little owl up in a tree.
A gorgeous little Northern Pygmy-owl.
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Sometimes it's easy
to find a hawk because a hawk will often attract a squawking murder
of crows. I guess this was a similar situation: the little owl
had attracted this big, hard-to-miss photographer. Awful nice
of the little guy to do that for me.
I circled around to
where I had a different angle, and I was just settling in when
the owl slowly lifted one of his claws up. I got this blurry photo
of it; he looks like he has a claw growning out of his chest..
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| The other
photog and I chatted for a few moments, and then he left. I kept
shooting the little guy for a little while. Here you can see his
claws and owly underparts a bit better. |
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Pygmy-owls have a fairly
distinctive posture in which they hold their tail folded up but
off to the side (not in line with the body). He's doing that a
little in the photo above, but I didn't get a really good shot
of it.
Anyhow, after a couple
of hundred photos of the owl, I decided it was time to move on.
I continued walking the way I had been going, which was west.
At the west edge of the preserve, I found a thrush in the brush.
It was a Varied Thrush. Here he's posing on a tree branch for
me.
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I looked out over the
water and saw a few ducks and an eagle, but none of them were
close enough to get good photos of. I walked north along the path
for a while, and found very little activity. I decided to head
back the way that I came.
A little ways away
from where I had left him, I found the pygmy-owl again. He was
in a tree right next to the path, and so I couldn't help but shoot
another couple hundred photos of him.
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| I won't
show you all those photos, but I will present one more. This one
shows the back of the owl's head. Pygmy-owls have white-fringed
dark spots on the back of their head. They're called eyespots, and
the theory is that they fool other birds or animals into thinking
that the owl is looking in the direction that it isn't. |
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It's not as good as
having eyes in the back of your head, but it's better than nothing,
I guess.
Occasionally accused
of having four eyes myself,
Tom
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