Short-eared Owl, Mississippi River, Green Island Wildlife Area, Iowa
This is by no means a sharp photo and I’m not talking only about the blurred wings (which I actually like), but the eyes and face are not really sharp either. However, I couldn’t resist to post this image because a Short-eared Owl has been in front of my camera only once before. There was hardly any light left when the owl appeared and hunted along the dike that crosses the Green Island Wildlife Area. With its buoyant flight and constantly changing directions it was difficult to lock on the focus. After watching the Trumpeter Swans (see my last post) I was just about to wrap it up when the owl approached my location on top of the dike. I still had the Nikkor 70-200, f/4 on camera, I used just before for some landscape photography. The only way to get at least a documentary shot was to increase ISO to 1000 and leave the lens wide open (f/4). With a little bit of light on the owl’s face and stretched out wing, the photo gives us an idea about the time when the hunting starts for the Shored-eared Owl. They forage mostly at night and the diet consists of mice, voles, moles, shrews, ground squirrels, small rabbits, and muskrats, but they also take small birds and large insects. Open spaces, like grasslands, marches, and prairies are the preferred habitat and the Green Island Wetlands fall certainly into this category.