Two owls - one shot. Almost!

A Short-eared Owl (Asio flammeus) hunts from atop a kestrel nest box. Our team stopped to watch this box because we spotted a red morph Eastern Screech-Owl looking out of the hole. The owl popped back inside when we stopped, and while awaiting his reappearance the short-eared landed. What a shot that would have made, had the little owl looked back out of his hole with the other owl over its head! The short-ear was not hunting the screech owl - the box is just a convenient perch to look for voles and other small mammals - their stock in trade. The big owl up top would not even have been able to see the little one had he peered back out, due to the little roof overhang. As incredibly acute as owls' hearing is, I am sure the boxed owl knew something was atop his home, perhaps hence his reluctance to show himself. Screech-owls are normally not too shy towards humans, at least quiet ones watching from inside a vehicle from a respectable distance.

When I made this shot, it was well into dusk and light was scarce. The image parameters are f/5.6 (wide-open with the Canon 400mm DO II and 1.4x extender), 1/50, and a very high ISO of 12,800. When we left a few minutes later, it was too dark to shoot pictures and getting too dark to even see the screech-owl if he did reappear in the hole (which I am sure he did, eventually). Chandlersville Christmas Bird Count, Muskingum County, Ohio, yesterday.
 

Finding screech-owls

A jumbo tiger salamander, Ambystoma tigrinum, peeks over a log. I photographed the amphibious brute back on February 15 on a nighttime prowl through the backcountry of Champaign and Logan counties. That evening was relatively warm and rainy, and although a bit early in the salamander migration season, some animals were moving. We've had nearly no good conditions in this part of the state since - too dry, too cold, etc.

A route that I like to patrol when looking for migrant salamanders goes through an oft-flooded area dominated by porous limestone karst topography. When rains bring the water table up, the h2o comes bubbling from the ground, saturating soils and flooding large areas. The Google Earth map above depicts one of my favorite salamander haunts. Nearly uninhabited by people - because their homesteads would routinely be flooded - and dominated by a nice mosaic of habitats.

Habitats that are not only desired by tiger salamanders and others in the amphibious crowd, but also owls. Namely, the eastern screech-owl. The aerial photo shows a screech-owl Eden: a juxtaposition of open meadows bordering brushy copses, scattered stands of larger trees, and water - lots of water. Screech-owls, in general, are not really birds of dense woodlands, but seem to reach peak numbers in largely open habitats such as shown above.

If you find yourself in any sort of similar situation - scruffy woods, lots of interspersed open country, small streams, wetlands or damp meadows - I guarantee that screech-owls are close at hand. This is easily our most common owl in Ohio, and localized populations can be large. Perhaps the most notable illumination into screech-owl numbers came during a Toledo area Christmas Bird Count conducted on January 6, 1982. Intrepid owlers detected 112 owls!

When I exited the car and drank in the sounds of an abnormally warm February evening - the odd spring peeper and western chorus frog calls, gadwall and other ducks chortling in the nearby marsh - I decided to call in an owl. A few renditions of the quavering mellifluous whistles triggered a response within a minute or two. Screech-owls can be quite ventriloquial, and even though this one sounded distant, I knew it wasn't.

A quick flick of the flashlight revealed the bird sitting about 20 feet away low in shrubs, looking around and occasional calling. We remained in this spot for about 10-15 minutes, and the owl remained the entire time. It seemed to quickly disregard us and resume its scanning for prey. I'd bet a newt that this bird and its mate gorge heavily on migrant salamanders, such as the tigers, when the amphibians make their vernal overland exodus to breeding pools. Screech-owls are well known for their fondness of aquatic fare, even snatching small fish, hence their proclivity for watery places.

This bird seems to be an intermediate brownish morph. Eastern screech-owls typically manifest two color morphs: ashy gray, and a brighter rufous-red coloration, with these intermediate forms cropping up occasionally.

NOTE: The color forms of screech-owls, rough-legged hawks, gray squirrels, etc. are not PHASES, although they are often referred to that way. A phase is a temporary condition, like a phase of the moon. Something in a phase will not remain that way; it will eventually transition to something else. Screech-owls and other animals that manifest distinctly different color forms normally do not change, or phase out of their innate coloration - they remain as such for their lifetime. Thus, such animals are properly termed MORPHS.

To make this image I used the Canon 5D IV and Canon 500mm f/4 II lens, handheld. My salamandering buddy put mild light from the outer sphere of a flashlight's glow on the bird, so I could find it and focus. A Canon 600 speedlite with diffuser, set to fairly low intensity, provided fill light. Camera setting were ISO 800, f/8, and 1/80 second. While the flash helps freeze the scene, the lens' image stabilization is extraordinary, allowing crisp handheld shots of a large camera rig at rather slow shutter speeds.

The owl-admiring paparazzi seemed not to bother the bird at all, and it was still there, head aswivel watching for salamanders, when we left.

A cooperative Eastern Screech-Owl (with comments on low-light photography)

f/4, 1/100th, ISO 400, + 1/3rd exposure compensation

An Eastern Screech-Owl peers from its roosting hole - a cavity in a gnarled box-elder. I made this image and those that follow yesterday at a local park. James Muller, a sharp birder and regular at this place, was making the rounds the other day when he heard agitated chickadees and other songbirds mobbing something. Astutely, he sought out the source of their angst and found the owl.

Screech-owls tend towards the tame, but this one takes the cake. It could care less about people watching and photographing from the trail, which is only about 25 feet or so away. As we represent neither food nor foe, the owl would rarely even cast a glance our way. Fortunately, the owl has been spending a fair bit of time sitting at the cavity entrance during the day, allowing its admirers to fawn over it.

I saw an opportunity to make some images of one of my favorite species, and headed over as soon as time permitted. Making nice clean images of the owl was not totally straightforward though, due to very dim (shaded) light conditions. There are some ways to combat low light, and I'll share them at the end of the post. Make note of the camera settings under each photo. All of them were made with the Canon 5D IV mounted on a Gitzo tripod, with the Canon 500mm f/4II lens, and all but the first image with the Canon 1.4x teleconverter (making for a 700mm lens).

f/9, 1/40th, ISO 500, -1/3rd exposure compensation

One of the rare times the owl deigned to look into the camera, showing us its slightly cross-eyed look.

f/9, 1/6th (yes - one-sixth of a second!), ISO 200, +1 stop exposure compensation

The little owl dozes, apparently enjoying the warmth of a sunny day and the few rays that penetrate his wooded locale. His mini-siestas seldom lasted long, as marauding Carolina Chickadees or vultures passing over would often grab the owl's attention.

f/9, 1/6th, ISO 500, +1 stop exposure compensation

Chickadee alert! The owl snaps his attention towards the annoying chickadees that routinely stopped by to loudly scold him. They would often approach within a few feet, and when the owl was down in his hole, would alight on the edge of the cavity and shout chickadee expletives into his lair. While small rodents such as mice often form a staple of a screech-owl's diet, they will certainly bag small songbirds if chance permits, hence the chickadees' dislike of the predator.

This is the camera rig set up on the owl's cavity, which is circled in red. The path made a nice operating surface that was far enough away to avoid any bother to the owl. As previously noted, the major problem was poor light. One way around that would be to use flash, but I won't do that with an owl and I don't think anyone should. The bright pulses of light would almost certainly annoy the owl, and likely send it back in the hole, or possibly even flush it. Even if not, photographers sending Better Beamer-boosted flash onto the bird would most certainly annoy other people who are admiring the bird, and thus create unnecessary conflict.

So, what to do? In such situations, ISO drives much of my decisions regarding camera settings. Although cameras are getting increasingly better at processing higher ISO settings, lower ones are always better. The higher the ISO, the grainier (noisier) the image becomes. The lower the ISO, the cleaner and more noise-free the image. Thus, the lower the ISO, the better the image. ISO is the digital equivalent of film speed from the olden days. Back then you would use 100 film speed for bright conditions, which would yield the cleanest images. 400 or 800 and up speed film for darker conditions, but with the trade-off being grainier images.

With my first image - which was one of the first that I made of the owl - I had the 500mm lens wide open at f/4, at which it harvests the most light. This allowed a fairly fast shutter speed of 1/100, with the ISO only reaching 400. The 5D IV handles higher ISO's pretty well, but I really dislike shooting at anything over ISO 800, and do my best to go lower than that. My issue here was that I really wanted to shut the aperture down to provide better depth of field as well as some increased sharpness, but that reduces the light that enters the camera even further. Also, after the first round of images, I decided I wanted to put on the 1.4x teleconverter to increase the focal length of the lens to 700mm. By doing that, the aperture goes to a minimum of f/5.6.

Fortunately, owls may as well be feathered rocks when they're roosting. They do move, but more often they just sit stock still, so shutter speed becomes less of an issue. So, with the camera rig firmly mounted on the tripod, I had a stable working platform. I then used "live view" which displays the scene on the screen on the back of the camera. In this mode, the internal mirror is locked up, which prevents even the faint shudder caused by the mirror's movement when the shutter is tripped. To further reduce any possibility of camera movement, I had a remote shutter release plugged into the camera. You can see that hanging off the tripod in the photo above. With this setup, the camera remains absolutely motionless when I trigger it, allowing me to use insanely slow shutter speeds caused by a small aperture of f/9 and very low ISO settings. As long as the owl did not move during the exposure, the slow shutter speed doesn't matter, and I get far cleaner images than if I shot at fast shutter speeds that would have required ISO settings that probably would have had to range to 3200 or even well above.

f/9, 1/6th, ISO 1000, +1 exposure compensation

As the day's end approached and light worsened, my ISO had to increase to maintain the same settings. This is one of the last photos that I made, near twilight. The ISO hit 1000, and that's about as high as I want to go with that if at all possible. The image, even with this tight crop, still looks pretty clean and sharp (and I greatly compress the images posted on this blog). And that's at one-sixth of a second!

While the techniques described here are well known to landscape photographers, they can be applied to birds and other animals, as long as they remain motionless long enough for the exposure to be made.

Eastern Screech-Owl becomes one with the tree

This stretch of bike trail along Alum Creek in Westerville gets lots of traffic - runners, walkers, bikers - just not at the moment that I made this photo. The trail has of late seen an uptick in a new element of user - birders. For some time, there has been an especially cooperative Eastern Screech-Owl, Megascops asio, roosting in a tree in the swatch of scruffy riparian woodland shown in this image. As this locale is only 12 minutes from my office, I've been wanting to pay a visit, camera in tow, for some time. Finally, after seeing another post to the Ohio Birds Listserv about the owl from Ira Shulgin, I had to trot up there yesterday over the lunch hour. Ira was good enough to give me precise directions to the roosting tree, which enabled me to quickly locate the little hooter.

Young riparian, or streamside, woods are often scruffy places, in part due to a proliferation of Box-elder trees, Acer negundo. These gnarled and scraggly maples are often a dominant tree in early successional habitats, and what they lack in aesthetics they more than make up for in wildlife value.

This is the owl's home turf, as seen from the edge of the bike path. The spot that is circled in red marks the owl cavity about 20 feet up in a Box-elder, and it would be extremely easy to walk right by and never notice. Scores of people do just that every day.

However, a close look at the Y-fork in the tree reveals a sleepy little owl, soaking up early afternoon rays. Eastern Screech-Owls are consummate bark mimics, and their plumage can match the bark of trees to a remarkable degree. Such camouflage serves to hide them well from potential predators, and the owls tend to hole up tight in spots such as this during the daylight hours.

That doesn't mean that they'll be missed by everyone. Tree-gleaners such as chickadees, nuthatches, and titmice often stumble into roosting screech-owls as they go about their business of inspecting tree trunks. When this happens, quite the hue and cry will be made and before long an entire gang of noisy chickadees and other songbirds will form a conspicuous twittering crowd around the hapless owl. Many a birder has discovered a roosting owl with the assistance of mobbing tree-gleaners.

Eastern Screech-Owls come in two classic color morphs: red, and gray. This individual is a gray, and this color form really blends well with bark. For the 20 minutes or so that I admired the bird, it never bothered to open its eyes and give me a glance, near as I could tell. Such slothfulness is typical daylight behavior for a screech-owl.

These owls are very common throughout Ohio - easily our most common owl species. They have a strong affinity for streamside habitats, and places such as the site depicted in this post almost always have them. This is in part due to the Box-elder trees, which often form good roosting cavities. It's a great irony that tree species that are typically derided as worthless by loggers, foresters and the lumber industry are often of the greatest value to wildlife.

If you are interested in owls - and who isn't! - mark your calendar for the weekend of February 15-17, 2013. That's when the Ohio Ornithological Society and Greater Mohican Audubon Society will be holding its Owls of North America Symposium at beautiful Mohican State Park. The event is headlined by the incomparable Denver Holt of the Owl Research Institute, and what a speaker he is! In addition to talks, there'll be field trips, owl-banding for Northern Saw-whet Owls, and much more. GO HERE to register.