Another Birding First: Barred Owl

I understand not everyone out there is into photographing birds let alone just watching them, but I am always intrigued by the variety of birds around our area as well as places Ive traveled to too.

I’ve always been a big fan of the birds of prey (Osprey being my favourite) and in this case I have been wanting to see owls in the wild. The only other time I have seen owls has been at the Vancouver Zoo as they stood on the arms of the volunteers. This time though, Keith and I ventured out into Stanley Park in hopes of finding the Barred Owl hang outs. We were in luck.

We checked out a few spots that some of the naturalists in the area have seen the owls, though we did not see anything in the trees. One area, around the ground, shows activity of owls in the form of ripped off crow wings, bones and whatknot, though we started to become frustrated that our search was turning up empty.

It was then, when we decided to head over to another potential spot, that we noticed something in the trees, it was a Barred Owl!

It was really cool to finally see one of these elusive nocturnal birds. We’ve heard that people have occasionally seen them out in the day light but I didn’t think we would ever actually see them without it being dawn or dusk. Keith and I hung around watching this owl for hours.

We saw him (or her) try and capture a ground squirrel (photo above) but was unsuccessful. Though he (or she) did get lucky a few moments later when it caught a field mouse and devoured it (whole) in front of us. Keith has photos of that as I was behind the owl at the time.

Did I mention how cute these guys are? So soft looking! I was hoping it would leave behind a tail feature or something but nope it wasn’t that nice of an owl. Want to know how friendly this owl was? Check out how close Keith is to it sitting on the tree below.

Also gives you an idea of how large (or not large) these owls are. I even got underneath it to take photos and it would just look at me without taking to flight.

I did try my best to be on the ball when it did decide to fly, though I was never really quick enough to get any decent shots of it in flight. The above photo was in a really shady area of dense tree as it whizzed by my head and landed in another tree. Oh and even though it flew within 1 foot of my head, you couldn’t hear it, no wonder they are deadly predators!

I’m excited I finally got photos of a resident owl in Stanley Park, now I just have to go through 240 photos of this owl and find out which one I should print to hang on the wall. I’m sure I’ll be uploading more photos of this owl over the next few days as well as going out to find it again, or the other owls in the park.

For the photogs in the audience who are curious as to what I used for these photos it was my Canon 7D with the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS. Changed between Av and Tv modes depending on what I wanted to accomplish and used the whole focal length during the 4 hours or so we were hanging out with the owl. I”m impressed though as the photo of the Owl’s head was taken at 3200 ISO and it’s not all that noisy!

What am I looking forward to finding next? We’ll there was a rumour of a Great Horned Owl in Stanley Park, and Pygmy Owls live in the park as well. Though I wouldn’t mind finding the coyote(s) either.