| Photojournal
- 18 April
2005
Ghowza!
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On Monday the 18th,
I took advantage of the good weather and late sunset by heading
out after work to a place in Tsawassen where there is a Great
Horned Owl nest. (Because the owls seem to nest there regularly,
I'm not going to further specify its location.) At this nest,
there were three young'uns, who were getting fairly big.
When I arrived, I found
the owls in the nest, which is a hollow old stump. Here's two
of them, looking up at something (probably the Bald Eagle that
was flying around).
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| After a
few minutes, an adult bird emerged from the back of the nest and
hopped up to a place where it could look out. Some of the locals
told me that this bird was the mother. |
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| A short
while later, the mother flew off. Here I caught a chick watching
her go. |
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| Soon one
of the chicks climbed up to look out. Even at this age, he's got
pretty sizeable claws. His fingers are probably as thick as mine. |
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| The mother
hadn't flown far; she was about ten or fifteen meters from the nest
on a branch where she could watch over it. She had perched almost
directly above me. I moved around, though, and was able to get a
decent camera angle on her. |
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| I turned
my attention back to the nest, and found three chicks visible. They
reminded me of three monks in grey robes. |
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| I watched
the owls for two hours, taking photos the whole time. The mother
stayed on the branch where she was, and I got several good photos
of her, including this one, where she's stretching a claw, |
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| and this
one, where she's cleaning it. |
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There is a standard
four-letter code used by many birders in North America for recording
their bird sightings (it was devised by the Bird Banding Laboratory,
which bands birds and tracks reports of them). For birds with
three words in their name, the default code is the first letter
of the first two words followed by the first two letters of the
last. So, for Great Horned Owls, the code is GHOW.
So here we have a pair
of little GHOWs peering out of the nest.
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I was quite taken with
the chicks and the way they were just looking around at everything,
watching with those big eyes. Owls are very interesting birds,
and the owl chicks were even better. It was a lot of fun to be
there and watch them, and way more interesting than going home
after work.
The owls were my only
subject that day.
Next time, I'll pay
a visit to cormorants, turtles, and my fine-footed friends in
Abbotsford.
Your friend who gives
a hoot,
Tom
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