We have a feast for birders today: several photos of both owls and terns (one good tern deserves another). First, the owls from reader Stephen Barnard, who tells me he considers these some of his best photos (and indeed, they’re terrific):
This Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus) can often be found perched in the morning if you know exactly where to look. He’s keeping an eye on my dog but seems a little drowsy.
He added in a later email:
I just wanted to point out that in this photo it looks awfully much like a cat.
Whaddya think?
And now the terns from reader and biologist Jacques Hauser. The pictures below were taken in Svalbard (Spitzbergen). His captions are indented:
The arctic tern, Sterna paradisea, is famous for its incredible migration from Arctic to Antarctic and back: 38’000 km per year.
A portrait. Note the beak is almost entirely red and the legs are very short compared to those of the common tern, Sterna hirundo.
They hunt small fishes by flying at about 5 – 10 meters above the water, looking down and then diving directly on them…
…and they do the same to any animal, including a human, that wanders too close to their eggs—in this case a female reindeer. It’s advisable to cover your head in the colonies! (it’s not a very good picture – but it’s a document…)
An adult sitting on its eggs:
A newly hatched chick – look at the egg-tooth on its beak. Mind you, this tiny (about 12-15 g) fluffy thing, if lucky enough to survive, shall spend New Year on the shores of the Weddell Sea!
Great pix! What a strange looking reindeer. I think that most owls look like kittehs.
Reindeers of Svalbard actually look strange, and are classified in their own subspecies: Rangifer tarandus brachyrhynchos. Contrary to most of the other subspecies they live in small groups or even solitary. They are small with short legs. Apparently their ancestors came from Groenland across the ice about 5000 years ago – or earlier.
They look more like sheep.
And fat.
Great Horned Owls and Cats: Convergent Evolution
– prey on rodents
– largely nocturnal
– acute vision and hearing
– talons
– mostly solitary
– tabby cat markings
🙂
Great pictures! I would like to see more pictures of your great horned owl, Stephen. Hope it becomes a regular feature here.
If so, then it should be named…
The close kinship of owls and cats has been recognized at least since Edward Lear’s time.
With all due respect, I don’t think “kinship” is the right term. They diverged from their common ancestor in late Carboniferous period, between 320 and 315 million years ago (Wiki), and are no more closely related than giraffes and hummingbirds.
Great Horned Owls are behaviorally cats with wings.
Well, of course the kinship is more spiritual than genealogical. What else can you call it when they have a romantic vacation together in a beautiful pea green boat?
Are you perhaps unfamiliar with “The Owl and the Pussycat”?
Yes.
The Owl and the Nightingale is a more apt poem for this site but I did think it would be more like the Owl and the Pussycat and it wasn’t. You can imagine my disappointment when I took Middle English literature.
Love the tern chick photo.
Yes, I was just going to say. They are especially adorable baby dinosaurs.
love the shots of the Owl. beautiful.
The fat, fuzzy/furry/feathery face, the gorgeous yellow eyes and the doziness make that owl look very much like my cat. Awww, I just want to scratch it (and then leap out of the way as it tries to bite me – also very much like a cat).
Years ago I had a close encounter with an injured great horned owl. They can be very scary when they feel they need to be (I was just trying to help it).
Beautiful pictures of the Great Horned Owl. It’s always difficult for me to realize that these “horns” have nothing to do with the ears… it’s a very convincing imitation!
Very nice tern photos! I love those birds. They are among the most elegant birds, IMO.
Beautiful photos all around and thanks for sharing them! I love GHOs, we have lots of them. It’s fun to be awakened by their hooting in the early morning.
We seem to hear them most frequently during fall and spring; but this may simply be a side effect of the higher probability of having open windows during those seasons (here in Minnesota)!
I was doing some reading just now about GHOs. It turns out it is hard to tell the males apart from the females, but one difference is how they do mating call hoots, which should be starting about now. Perhaps Stephen could watch out for those?
The male generally holds itself more horizontally and puffs itself up while giving 4-5 hoots. A female responds with different answers, including a stream of 6-8 hoots.
They keep me awake, in a pleasant way.
‘When this trees’ rockin’ don’t come knockin’!
A comment for the photographically minded:
The second owl photo was shot hand-held at a shutter speed of 1/90 sec and it’s a sharp as it gets. This struck me as remarkable because I was shooting at 700mm focal length, and the rule of thumb is that you should have a shutter speed of at least 1/focal-length, or 1/700 sec in this case, to get a sharp hand-held result. I never thought this would turn out when I shot it.
What’s happened is due to the phenomenal on-lens image stabilization of my fancy, expensive Canon 500mm II lens (+ 1.4x). Canon claims a four-stop effectiveness. By my calculations, this photo was 5.5 stops from the rule of thumb. It’s magical technology.
I’m usually trying to shoot birds in flight, when image stabilization is useless. It does nothing for motion blur — you need a fast shutter, period — but these photos taught me a lesson about shooting stationary subjects in low light; namely, that I can rely on the IS much more than I thought.
Thanks Stephen. Yes, my Sigma 150-500 has some wonderful IS. I have gotten razor-sharp hand-held shots down to 1/30 sec. at 500mm (effectively 750mm on my cameras).
I actually love how it works: First the lens does its AF, then the power switches to IS, and the rig goes into “steady cam” mode, where, because the IS is lens-based, it more or less freezes the image in the viewfinder. Makes it MUCH easier to frame a photo than the usual wobbly around without the IS. I really love it.
Ahhh the sigma lenses are getting quite nice. I have a sigma macro that I like a lot & I’ve been tempted by the zooms. I do see Sigma produces a f/5.6 800mm but I think I’m getting what telescope enthusiasts call “aperture fever” in wanting bigger and bigger telescopes – here I want bigger and bigger primes that become just unwieldy.
The owl is not impressed.
He seemed to be interested in my Border Collie’s vole hunting technique, but mostly he just wanted to get some shut eye.
I have feral cats and great-horned owls both hunting mice in my yard (I live on a farm). Just glancing at an animal on the ground it is often difficult to tell if it is a cat or an owl. Depending upon the angle, the two have similar profiles.
Recent tracking studies are showing that Arctic Tern migrations are even longer than previously thought. Distances up to 91,000 km in one year were recorded.
They don’t follow direct routes and besides using favourable winds, just seem to enjoy going where they will.
Fijn, R.C.; Hiemstra, D.; Phillips, R.A.; van der Winden, J. (2013). ‘Arctic Terns Sterna paradisaea from the Netherlands migrate record distances across three oceans to Wilkes Land, East Antarctica’, ARDEA, vol. 101, pp. 3–12
Abstract
Wow, that’s up there with my travel patterns, and I cheat by using airplanes.
I know that insect and microbe transmission by airplane is always a serious and lethally non-ha-ha subject, and very topical at the moment. But I do look forward to one of these ringing or GPS-tracking experiments finding a particular bird that does it’s migration in the wheel wells of airplanes. It’s a habit that is likely to spread, because it’ll have major energy advantages for the bird that tries it.
I found a PNAS full article about the tracking work.
The devices are referred to as geolocators, weighing 1.4g, which log the time of sunrise and sunset to determine locations over a whole year. They are of course, ineffective during 24 hour sunlight. GPS isn’t used because of the weight of the batteries necessary to handle the current drain.
Wonderful photos, all around. I love terns – such close cousins of the gulls. How I envy you being there to witness the birth of those incredible birds!
Wonderful photos! Two wonderful subject species as well.