I have lots of news and new photos to post. We just returned from a trip to New Mexico (Bosque del Apache NWR and Santa Fe, Randall Davey Audubon Center) where I took almost 900 photos, almost all of which were of birds. Those should eventually be posted to this blog, but it might take awhile.
In the meantime, we hadn’t been back but a couple of days before we had a rather dramatic development here at the house. For the past six weeks or so I, and some of our neighbors, had been discovering one or more Barred owls in the neighborhood. For the most part this owl would be found in what the neighborhood refers to as the ‘wetland’, which is located roughly two blocks (“as the owl flies”) from our house. (I believe I have at least two prior posts involving this owl.)
On Saturday (11/9/2019) morning my sister, who has been house-sitting for us while we were in New Mexico, was outside in the process of reentering the house when a Barred owl flew to the watercourse in our front yard, located about ten feet from the house. It took my sister several minutes to gain our attention and while she was subtly trying the owl got a drink of water. By the time I responded with my camera the owl was sitting on one of our staging sticks directly beside the pond. I took a couple of quick shots through the window (normally a no-no for me) to insure that I got some sort of photo. The owl flew out of my view to the side of the house. I sneaked out the door to try to find it but didn’t see it at first. I finally looked up in the yew tree above my head and there was the owl… less than ten feet away! My sister and wife joined me and we were able to watch the owl for about ten minutes before we had to leave for a breakfast commitment. When we returned an hour or so later the owl was gone and we couldn’t locate it.
Excuse the quality, but this is a photo of the owl in the yew tree I took with my iPhone 11 Pro!
The good news is that I obtained some photos to document the event, the first known owl visit to our property! The bad news is that I had messed with my camera at the end of our trip and altered a key setting on it, resulting in rather severe underexposures that I couldn’t fix in Lightroom. However, I think the images, although underexposed, are rather interesting and have some value… and that’s why you’re seeing them here!
