Owls and Waxwings

(January 2nd) Over the last few days, I became quite good at spotting owls and knowing where they would be. This morning I got off to a great start finding this Northern Hawk Owl perched close to the roadside. It was a lot warmer today (-5) and sunny as well. The best part about it being sunny is that it is so much easier to spot the owls with the better visibility.

I continued on to where the Snowy Owls were, and boy were there owls. I found a total of five different owls. This owl was the only individual I found who was perched on a natural perch - all the rest were on utility poles. The owls spend pretty much all the time sitting still and constantly scanning for prey. I was a bit surprised to see just how much they move their head around. And of course like all owls they can rotate their head more than 360 degrees!

Interesting tidbit out there for any Harry Potter fans. The owl in the movies is supposedly a male character. Well the pictures you see here are of male owls. The problem with male owls is that they have a lot of black barring on them. So for the movie, they used a female owl since the females are much more white. I hope male owls don't start developing an image complex out there and want to become more white!

After a great morning with the owls, I headed to the next location. When I got here at first it was pretty dead and I started to enjoy the landscape. But I was in for a surprise as a big flock of Bohemian Waxwings descended on the spot. It was my first time seeing these birds (we have Cedar Waxwings in southern Michigan) and I love their plumage.

The waxwings were there for a reason. There were several crab apple tree and the birds were there to go to town. They were ravenous eating the apples at a furious pace. Preoccupied with food, they basically ignored me and came quite close.

I couldn't believe how fast they were eating. In a few minutes they would completely denude a tree of all apples. I was having a great time, starting to get into a groove and improve on the quality of the images. Of course that's when I should have been worried. Soon a bunch of snowmobiles came down the road. For some reason birds seem to hate the noise of snowmobiles and took off as soon as they could hear it. Strange, birds don't usually mind the noise of airplanes. Today I got the best bird photographs of the long weekend.