Dusk With A Barred Owl

On November 28th, I drove to Landham Brook Marsh Conservation Area to photograph harriers. There was nothing better to photograph. I was worried that I had come too late in the day. The sun was setting, and I didn't see any movement on the marsh. I remembered that I had set up a camera trap on the 21st, I decided to walk into the woods to recover it. By this point, the sun was down. It was very cold, and my feet had sunken into the mud in the marsh up to my shins, meaning I was hiking with soaked jeans, socks, and shoes. I went off trail, headed in the direction of my camera, through a swamp dominated by bare red maples. I walked for about 50 feet off the trail, and noticed the silhouette of a barred owl:

after around 30 seconds, It dove off it's perch, and flapped out of the swamp, into the thick woods. I tried taking flight shots, but I was unprepared and there were trees in the way...

...I tried my best to watch where it landed, but it flew just out of my view. I headed in that direction, straight into an area of dense new growth, where pine saplings blocked my view of the canopy above me. I walked about 100 feet into the thicket, and the understory finally opened up. I looked closely at the trees ahead. Had I missed the owl? I turned around, and realized that I had just walked underneath the owl, and kept going. It was behind me, and looked like it was ready to take off, but it didnt.

I usually shoot in sport mode, because I think it tends to do a good job of quickly adjusting the settings to make realistic photos. Sometimes, though, like during the night, I don't want my photos to be realistic. For example, the 2 photos above were shot in sport mode. That's exactly how the owl looked to my naked eye. Just a silhouette. I put my camera in manual, and scrolled the ISO up a lot, to make everything brighter. The results are photos that look they they were shot during the day...

The barred owl was much more tolerant of me this time. It stared at me with its radar dish of a head for about 10 seconds when I first found it, but it was distracted. It kept looking left and right, left, and right over and over. I was photographing an owl at night, and it was too busy looking for mice to care about the photographer all the way down in the bushes. It did shoot me a quick glance whenever a twig snapped, or my noisy camera shutter went off, but would only stare at me for a second before resuming its hunting behavior. It was awesome to be able to watch an owl hunting for the first time...

Barred owls are adapted to live and hunt in a swamp habitat. They hunt for mice, squirrels, and voles, like other owls, but will also go "fishing". An owl will land in water only a few inches deep, or along the banks of a stream and hunt for frogs, crayfish, salamanders and crabs. I have caught barred owls standing on the forest floor in swamps plenty of times, and now I know why.

I spent about 5 minutes watching it before I decided it was getting too dark to photograph, even with the adjusted ISO. I wanted to give it some space. I tried leaving the same way I came in, assuming it would be used to me, but it flew off as I walked underneath it. 

My trail camera was an absolute failure because I had forgot to put the SD card in it, a mistake I've been making regularly since I started wildlife photography. Very frustrating. I headed to my car with wet jeans, and empty trail camera, but my Canon was filled with the best barred owl photos i've ever gotten. To see all the photos I took that night, check out these two links to the inaturalist.com observations: Photos From Owl's Second Perch,   Photos From Second Perch