The Howland
Picture Pages: Boreal Owl The Howland
Picture Pages: Boreal OwlPage by Royce
Last update: $Date: 2004/10/24 03:08:19 $ (UTC)
The Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus) is one of the tougher North American owls to see. In part this is because, as the name suggests, this owl normally resides in the boreal and montane forests of northern Canada. (It does have some spots of residence as well in some of the northwestern United States and Minnesota, as well as points of rare occurrence in the northeastern states.) The other part is because this is a small, well-camouflaged, nocturnal bird that prefers dense coniferous or mixed forest. When roosting during the day it will be hard to find. The only time I have spotted this bird, ironically, was in a back yard within the Calgary city limits. It was a classic "lifer" sighting, and was an exciting local birding event since this is a very rare species for the city.
As with all owls, I find the Boreal Owl to be a fascinating bird. Its fine plumage has a rich chocolate color streaked with white, and rich with detail. The back and sides have large white spots, while the forehead has small white spots. The pale, heart-shaped face with its fine feathers is ringed all around by a dark border, within which are set the pale yellow eyes and sharp, down-curved beak. The fully feathered legs end in respectable claws with which prey is seized. The owl often strikes its prey, typically small rodents, from perches on tree limbs. According to the CLO profile the Boreal Owl, which hunts by sound as owls do, has ear openings that are asymmetrically located on its skull -- one lower and one higher. This apparently helps gauge the distance and height of prey moving through underbrush or snow cover.
Bandwidth warning: There are large Quicktime video files linked from this page! Use caution if you have a slow connection.
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Here is a close-up shot of the Boreal Owl as seen on October 16, 2004. The location was in Calgary, in the back yard of Pat Bumstead who was already playing host to the first recorded Hooded Warbler for the city. Many local birders who had trooped through her yard for the warbler (or still were doing so), made the pilgrimage once again for the owl. Pat joked that she should start charging admission. I would pay, for species like these! Pat gave me a call around 9:00 AM on this chilly Saturday morning when the owl was first discovered -- never mind sleeping in or lazing about, I was extremely grateful to get a call like this. The discovery was the result of a small flock of chickadees going mad. A Boreal Owl, possibly the same one, had been seen briefly in Pat's yard earlier that same week, also triggering a ruckus with the other back yard birds. So when the noise went up several decibels on this morning, Pat right away started scanning her back spruce trees and found this owl about 5 meters up, well positioned on a limb for viewing and photography. I got over to Pat's place as quickly as possible, with my heart racing -- hopefully it would still be there. And it was! Quite a few birders gathered very quickly. While the owl mostly was trying to doze with its head turned 90 degrees to the right from us, every so often it would perk up a bit and look around -- especially when some harassment from other birds would occur, or when a squirrel would come sniffing around. The morning was overcast and windy, but on this occasion when the bird looked over towards us, the wind fortunately died away just then. A nice, clean shot resulted in spite of a shutter speed of only about 1/2 second. Owls make great photographic subjects -- especially rare and obliging ones! This shot was taken with my main digiscoping setup from a distance of about 6 meters. The photo was cropped slightly on the top and brightened up a bit with contrast and saturation adjustments, plus some gaussian unsharp mask. I hardly had to zoom the camera lens at all to fill the frame nicely.
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You know how sometimes you're sitting in class or in a meeting, and while it may not be all that boring you somehow just can't keep your eyes open or your head straight up? You know you should be paying attention, but your eyelids droop, your head leans over, ... and then the person in charge asks you that really important question. This shot of the little Boreal Owl reminds me of that sleepy feeling. In the owl's defense, of course, it really is nap time for the bird. This photo was also taken with my main digiscoping setup. It is uncropped but otherwise with similar adjustments made as in the first photo.
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Here, zoomed in a little compared to the previous shot, is the view of the owl that we usually had while watching it that morning -- nap time. This is another digiscoping shot, uncropped with similar adjustments made as in the previous shots.
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More nap time. Maybe the reason the owl kept its head averted a lot was the noise all of us pesky birders were making -- it could have made it tough to sleep. We were being pretty quiet, but a bird that can hunt tiny rodents under cover at a distance using a form of stereoscopic sound likely could hear us quite plainly. This is another digiscoping shot, slightly cropped and with similar adjustments made as in the previous shots.
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Here the Boreal Owl looks to the left. Hmm, is that ketchup on its beak? This is another digiscoping shot, adjusted as with the preceding photo.
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Ah, not ketchup. It turns out the whole time we watched the Boreal Owl sitting on the tree limb, it had been clutching a mouse in its claws. Nap time is over for awhile, now it's snack time. This is another digiscoped shot, adjusted as with the preceding photo. In this shot I tried bumping the ISO up to 200 to get a little better shutter speed, hoping to counteract the motion blur I was getting from the breeze. The shutter speed was improved but not by all that much, and this shot isn't as crisp as some of the previous ones.
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(If this link doesn't work for you, you may need to update your version of Quicktime. Or just right-click and save to your local hard drive and try playing it from there.) |
Here is the first of four digiscoped segments of Quicktime video. In this segment, the Boreal Owl is just looking around. The exposure is a little dark so you may need to increase the brightness for playback on your system.
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(If this link doesn't work for you, you may need to update your version of Quicktime. Or just right-click and save to your local hard drive and try playing it from there.) |
Here is the second of four digiscoped segments of Quicktime video. In this segment, the Boreal Owl does a little preening, then reacts to the scolding of some chickadees. The exposure is a little dark so you may need to increase the brightness for playback on your system.
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(If this link doesn't work for you, you may need to update your version of Quicktime. Or just right-click and save to your local hard drive and try playing it from there.) |
Here is the third of four digiscoped segments of Quicktime video. In this segment, the Boreal Owl does some more reacting to chickadee scolding. This segment has more wind to contend with, but the owl is the most active of any of the segments posted here. The exposure is a little dark so you may need to increase the brightness for playback on your system.
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(If this link doesn't work for you, you may need to update your version of Quicktime. Or just right-click and save to your local hard drive and try playing it from there.) |
This is the fourth and final of the digiscoped segments of Quicktime video. In this segment, the Boreal Owl enjoys a few bites of tasty mouse. The exposure is a little dark so you may need to increase the brightness for playback on your system.
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In this photo, the first of a new sequence, the Boreal Owl is looking right at us. There are blurry tips of tree limbs visible to the left and right in the foreground, and others not visible just above. This gives a bit of feel for the gap in the tree cover through which we were able to view and photograph the owl. This photo was taken with a Canon EOS 10D + EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens, mounted on a Manfrotto 190PRO tripod with a Manfrotto 488RC2 medium ball head. The shutter was triggered using the Canon RS-80N3 electronic remote release. Subsequent shots below were taken with the same configuration. Although this shot was reduced in size and adjusted for contrast, saturation and sharpness, it was not cropped. (The other shots following in this sequence are all cropped heavily to focus in on the bird.) Thus this full frame can be compared to some of the digiscoped ones above, and it provides one visual reason why I continue to use my digiscoping setup. The ability to zoom right in on cooperative subjects when digiscoping is unequaled with an SLR type camera + lens, unless a lot more money is spent for super-telephoto lenses.
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I got a fun sequence of the Boreal Owl preening, face towards our position. Unfortunately the shots were all blurred from the swaying motion of the branch the owl was sitting on. This probably would have been a good situation to max out the ISO and shoot with the aperture wide open to get as fast a shutter speed as possible. Instead I was at ISO 400, f/13.0 and (probably through cold, fumbling fingers) had set a -1/3 stop exposure. With the EOS 10D, shooting at a high ISO will work out okay in terms of picture quality. I routinely shoot at ISO 800. I have even shot at ISO 1600 in twilight with available light, and had what I feel is an acceptable level of noise. With the Nikon point & shoot cameras I use for digiscoping, picture quality deteriorates due to noise above ISO 100, and is especially bad above ISO 200.
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Here the Boreal Owl is looking up at the scolding of some Black-capped Chickadees that were half-heartedly mobbing the owl. This happened from time to time but the owl usually ignored all comers, and they would go away. The only time the scolding produced any degree of agitation for the owl is shown in the third video segment above.
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The chickadees have departed for the time being, and the Boreal Owl watches them leave. The bird's eye, showing the yellow color and reflected "catch light", is something to look for in a good bird photo. I didn't get this effect very often on this day due to the shooting conditions, and the generally sleepy state of the subject.
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Hmm, did I just say "the generally sleepy state of the subject?"
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Here the Boreal Owl is looking straight at us again. Unlike the first of the sequence of 10D photos, which has the bird in the same pose, in this case I have cropped heavily.
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I have included this shot as a single example of a sequence I took with the addition of the Canon 1.4X teleconverter. I find that adding the TC to the 100-400mm really softens the resulting images, even when I can get what I think is an excellent manual focus. (The 10D camera requires f/5.6 or better for its autofocus to function, and adding the 1.4X TC effectively kicks the 100-400mm lens up to f/8.0. Thus the lens becomes manual focus only.) Of course given the poor shooting conditions of the day, any loss of sharpness could be attributed to other factors. However I do find I get consistently unsatisfying results when using the 1.4X TC with this lens, so I very rarely use the combination, and then only on a tripod. A few folks I have talked to about the combination indicate that teleconverters don't work well on the 100-400mm zoom, but some photographers evidently are able to use the combination and get better results than I seem to get. In any event, the 100-400mm zoom lens alone on the 10D is a decent enough configuration, even when hand-held (thanks to the image stabilization). It provides 640mm in 35mm terms due to the 1.6 crop factor of the 10D, and I have found this is a good focal length to start at for bird photography.
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Unless stated otherwise, all photos and other content on these pages is copyright © 2002 - 2004 by Royce Howland.
Please don't steal anything for your own purposes, in particular if you have a plan for making fabulous stacks of cash in so doing. If you would like to use a photo or other content you find here, or just want to contact us about something, please send email to royce@3ge.com.
