It was a long, enjoyable day that I spent with a friend and fellow photographer recently. He took me to a site in NH where he had found a Barred Owl nesting. We spent most of the day standing waiting for the owl to appear. In the 7 hours we were there it probably spent only about 20 minutes in the nest hole — 4 or 5 few-second visits midday then two 10 minute visits later in the day. We eventually learned why it was not incubating its eggs.
Our first order of business was to wait — no owl in sight but some “who cooks for you” from the woods. After about an hour it made an appearance but did not come near the nest hole. Then it was more waiting as the owl disappeared, reappeared high in the trees, and generally basked and preened on a favored branch high in a pine (not shown here) in the warm sun on a cold morning.
We had been at the site almost two and a half hours when the owl darted into its nest hole head first, then popped out, waved to us, and departed. It was all over in less than 5 seconds based on my camera data. It would not return to the nest hole for another 90 minutes.
In actuality, the owl did not wave to us. It just looked like it did as it extracted its left wing from the hole.
When it returned it again spent only a short time at the nest — this time less than one minute from landing to leaving. More prepared for what to expect than earlier, I was able to capture this sequence.
We believed the owl would not soon return, and we were tired of standing around. So we took a hike of a few miles, finding other birds to photograph. But that is another story. We returned 90 minutes later and sat down in the sun to eat our lunch and wait some more.
At about 2:25 pm we saw something move near the bottom of the nest opening. This explained it all. The eggs had hatched and the young chicks were being fed very occasionally. We never saw the owl with any food; perhaps it was small or being regurgitated.
Thirty seconds after the above photo of the chick was taken, the owl returned. It stayed for all of 8 seconds, but I got this sequence which lasted less than 2 seconds.
We waited another 35 minutes and got a final sequence of photos before we called it a day.
