mon, 15-oct-2007, 19:55

great horned owl

great horned owl

Earlier Nika was out in the dog yard with Deuce, barking up a storm near the dog shed. It was starting to get dark, so I couldn’t really see what she was barking at. I wanted a beer anyway, so I got my boots on for a walk out to the red cabin. About a quarter of the way out there I heard a strange screeching noise. At first I thought maybe it was moose antlers rubbing on metal behind the dog shed, but when I looked where the sound came from I saw a great big bird in the birch tree behind the sheds. Raven? Then it turned it’s head, looked at me and started moving it’s head up and down, back and forth, probably trying to figure out what I was.

The photo is pretty bad, but it’s a great horned owl. Honest! The camera has an ISO adjustment feature, which might have helped a bit, but I didn’t want to mess around with the settings too much in case it flew away. I snapped a couple photos and then watched it through my binoculars. After a couple minutes of looking around, it saw something over by the red cabin and flew over there.

I’d heard great horned owls calling at our old house, and thought I heard one here a week ago, but seeing one so close to the house was a real treat.

Piper on my lap, large

piper on my lap

Meanwhile, Piper wanted out to see what Nika had been barking at. When I came back in to listen to the Rockies game (the wheels seem to be coming off for the Diamondbacks), you can see her petition to go outside in the photo. She can be very cute.

tags: birds  house  owl  Piper 
sat, 12-may-2007, 08:27

baked redpoll

baked redpoll

Last night we had hamburgers for dinner because Fred Meyer didn’t have any good looking fish. I’ve been wanting to start a “Friday Night Fish Night” tradition to get more fish into our diet, but it’s hard when the local megamarket doesn’t have anything worth eating on Friday afternoon. We just bought a side of beef from a local meat company, and have some older frozen hamburgers in the freezer to eat before our all-natural Alaska meat shows up next week.

I use a chimney starter to get the coals going (it’s the silver tube sitting in the little Weber in the photo), and it must have been throwing off enough heat to warm up the redpoll in the photo. He’s in the lower left. He laid there for at least five minutes warming himself by the heat from the coals. Redpolls don’t appear to be all that smart (they’re called “pigpolls” by bird feeders around here), but this one really knew what he was doing. Click on the photo for a larger, and still fairly grainy image.


tags: birds  deck  redpoll 
tue, 13-dec-2005, 16:57
Boreal Owl

A few days ago we had this little guy show up at the tree nearest to our house. The photo was taken by my wife, standing about four feet away from it. We've got a whole bunch of bird feeders all over the deck, and we think the owl was probably harvesting voles that come out to eat birdseed that makes it to the ground. We often see a flying squirrel occupying the same perch on that tree, but he's been absent for a few days now.

You can see larger versions of the photograph at my wife's Flickr page.

tags: birds  deck  house  owl 

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