Last week, I published a couple of posts of a very successful outing in southwest Missouri, to photograph the wonderful little Short-eared Owls (if you missed these posts, you can find them by clicking on these links: “Owl Prowl, Part 1” , “Owl Prowl, Part 2”). As usual, whenever an outing goes very well, it’s like an addiction … I have to go back for more!!! Well, I drove back down to the prairie a couple of days later. As it goes, nature does things on it’s own time! Didn’t see a single owl. I was a bit skeptical that I would have a good day (the temperatures were very warm, and the biggest issue was the strong winds). Well, Mother Nature won that battle!
But not to be too discouraged, I began looking at the future forecasts to see if another day would be arriving that would give me more hope of photographing the owls. On Monday of this week, the weather looked to be very appealing … temps were to top out at ~32F, clear skies, and the wind was very light (only about 5-6 mph). Looked good on paper! So I left home in the early afternoon and drove down to the prairie. Just like the very successful trip earlier, the owls began flying/hunting at about 4:30 pm, well before sunset. The lighting was great, most of the time no wind was even detected, and the owls were very cooperative. In fact, at one point, I counted at least 5-6 owls in the air at a time. The trip was another great success! Owls flying by low, some owls “kamikazi diving” into the prairie grasses after rodents, overall great cooperation with these birds of prey.
In today’s post, I’m sharing a couple of my favorite images from this outing, showing the beautiful, yellow eyes of the short-eared owl. There will be another post, or so, with more owl images, coming in the next few days, after I have had a chance to finish editing the shoot, so enjoy this first installment:
I’ll share some more owls from this trip in the next post.
Photographic Equipment Used:
- Canon 7D Mark 2 body
- Canon 500mm, f/4 IS lens + Canon 1.4x TC
- Bogen 3221 tripod, with Wemberly gimbal head
- ISO 400
- Aperture f/8
- Shutter 1/640 sec. and 1/500 sec.