Male Short-eared Owl Showing His Ear Tufts

Alert male Short-eared Owl showing his ear tufts – Nikon D500, f6.3, 1/1600, ISO 500, Nikkor 500mm VR with 1.4x TC, natural light, not baited

Short-eared Owls are among my favorite birds to photograph because they are charismatic, I adore their bright yellow, forward facing eyes and their faces can be very expressive at times. Nearly every time you see a Long-eared Owl you will see their long “ears” which are really long tufts of feathers but with Short-eared Owls their short ear tufts aren’t visible all that frequently.

Most often I see the ear tufts of Short-eared Owls when they are on alert, when there is a wind blowing the tufts from behind the owl or when they appear curious about something they can see or hear. Looking through my Short-eared Owl photo gallery I can probably count the number of photos I have of them with their ear tufts showing on two hands so I am always happy when I add another one or two to my portfolio and I did two days ago in northern Utah. I think this male Short-eared Owl was curious about the vehicle parked on the other side of the road from it. I took a long series of this owl until another vehicle flew by and the owl took off.

By the way, the actual ears of this owl aren’t even located where the ear tufts are, their ears are below the tufts.

This hasn’t been a great year for finding Short-eared Owls but I will take photos of them every chance I get.

The swelling of my lower eye lid seems a little bit better this morning, I did go to my doctor’s office about it and I am applying cold compresses and topical steroids and that is helping.

And some of you may have noticed issues getting to my site yesterday and I wanted to explain that my server has been undergoing DDoS attacks and that is what caused the outages. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack occurs when multiple systems flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system, usually one or more web servers. Translation: Someone with computer skills has too much time on their hands and is up to no good. I do want to mention that your device isn’t at risk when my server is under a DDoS attack, you will just find it hard to get to my site when an attack is going on. I’m doing all I can to mitigate the attacks.

Next, until the end of this month I may not post daily and when I do post the posts might be short and sweet. It isn’t anything bad, it is actually great because someone I love and who is near and dear to me and have known my entire life is coming on Saturday for a visit and I am looking forward to spending time with her.

Life is good. Even with a swollen eye. Even with server issues.

Mia

Click here to see more of my Short-eared Owl photos plus facts and information about this species.