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It was Christmas day,
and I was out at the Boundary Bay dyke, hangin' with the Snowy
Owls, as I wrote about in my last entry. I caught an interesting
little sequence with one owl in the middle of that adventure,
and I thought I'd present it in a separate entry.
Sometime around 2:30,
I was up on the dyke and saw a Snowy fly and land on the end of
a log in front of me, quite near the dyke. (The dyke is just out
of frame on the right in this photo).
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| I hurried
down the dyke to get closer to him. |
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| Well before
I got to the closest location to him on the dyke, he took off. |
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| With one
mighty beat of his wings, he moved sideways to the right about two
meters. |
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| He flapped
again to stabilize there and went a little forward. |
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| And then
he dropped to ground, presumably on prey. |
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| He sat there
for a bit, looking around. |
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| I moved
closer on the dyke, trying to see if he was indeed on prey. It seemed
like he was, because he was bending down occasionally, like this. |
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| And then
popping his head up to look around. |
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| I moved
even further along, but still couldn't see if he was standing on
something. He sat up as follows and looked around. I think that
someone was coming along behind me on the dyke with their dog or
on their bike. |
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| Before I
got to the nearest point on the dyke, he took off, apparently carrying
something. |
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| I had been
suspecting that he had caught a rodent, but that sure seems not
to be the case. |
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| Here's a
detail of that previous shot; it looks to me like he's got a bird.
Sadly, I can't i.d. the prey. My guide books have pictures of birds
perched, and pictures of them flying, but none of them have any
good pictures of how different birds look when hanging from the
talons of a raptor. |
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| Anyhow,
the snowy took his meal and flew fairly far out on the foreshore,
as the next few shots show. |
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| Here he's
coming in for a landing, ready to kick back with his Christmas dinner. |
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After this, I went
looking for closer subjects, and found a few, as detailed in my
previous entry. Then I went off to feast on some bird, myself.
I was a little surprised
at this sequence, as I would think that the prey would have flown
off when the owl came a-hovering. It wasn't like the owl was particularly
quick. I'm therefore led to suppose that the prey was either previously
injured or had a "hide" or "freeze" rather
than "flee" reaction. Maybe it was even the dead American
Wigeon that I had seen earlier.
Hold the stuffing,
Tom
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