Perfect Perches, Part I

Northern Hawk Owl and Short-tailed Shrew         27 February 2010

Northern Hawk Owl and Short-tailed Shrew. The Northern Hawk Owl is a true species of owl, but its bodily adaptations and behaviors are more similar to a hawk, with swift flight, diurnal (daylight) hunting habits, and the habit of hunting from a high, conspicuous perch. 

When I was just 15 years old, I was given the Audubon Encyclopedia of North American Birds for my birthday.  The bird photographs were some of the best ever published at the time, and I remember the strong sensation of imprinting that overcame me as I stared at the vivid hummingbird photographs.  There were a couple of images that combined sharp feather detail, rich color, and perfect perches, all in front of an even, clean, saturated background.  To look at these pictures was to hold a bird closely.  

My passion for bird photography grew quickly, and later that winter,  I bought my first SLR camera with my savings account.  It was a 1970 Minolta SRT 101 with a Vivitar 70-210 Macrozoom.  I shot print film, advanced each frame with the crank of a lever, and within a year, I had made my first "perfect perch" photograph. I had enticed a Purple Finch to perch upon a stick taped to a bird feeder.   In the last decade, I have vigorously rediscovered my desire to make sharp, clean images of birds, well saturated in color, exciting in detail, without distracting elements, clean in background and perfect in perch.   To get such images in a truly natural and wild setting is very challenging.

In February of 2010, a Northern Hawk Owl spent the winter surviving within Fish Lake State Wildlife Area and Fish Lake Meadows State Natural Area in Burnett County, Wisconsin.  It hunted actively and very successfully, and it showed almost no fear of people.  To this bird, I was merely a moose or woodland caribou. This hawk owl was truly a product of  boreal Canadian experiences.

On many separate occasions, I observed the bird as it successfully caught and ate red-backed voles, meadow voles, and short-tailed shrews.  Some of the voles were pounced by the owl nearly at my feet as I walked through the sedges, the rodents flushed out of hiding by my approach.  Photographing this bird had become a symbiotic process. Every effort to get closer to the owl seemed to beat some tiny mammal out of its lair.  Some of the prey was consumed on the spot, but many of the small mammals were cached in the broken tops of oak and aspen.  Earlier in the winter, the Hawk Owl often hovered among big, lazy snowflakes before plunging into the sedges of Fish Lake Meadow.  As the winter season wore on, the hawk owl spent more time hunting from perches, taking shrews from the forest edge and red-backed voles from fallen timber.  Not a visit passed without the bird displaying a story of predatory success, and then, sometime in middle March,the sun high and warm in the sky, the well-nourished bird flew off to the Canadian taiga again.

In all of our encounters, the 27th of February provided my favorite set of images.  On this day, the hawk owl hunted the far northern edge of Fish Lake Meadow, a flooded sedge marsh containing the scattered skeletal remnants of a short-lived forest.  The remaining snags, low to the marsh and encrusted in lichen, provided good hunting for the owl and equally good hunting for the my artist's eye.   It was a day of perfect perches.

Northern Hawk Owl coughing out an owl pellet, the undigested hair and bones of shrews and voles. All images were made handheld with a Canon 30D and Canon EF 300 f4 L IS lens.