Let’s check your powers of observation! These two photographs were taken seconds apart yesterday evening shortly before sunset. There is a subtle difference. Same juvenile owl … near Lake Superior in Duluth. You may need to maximize the images. I will admit it took me a while to figure out the difference, but I knew w/o knowing why the photos were different!

It has been fun to find my family of owls again after 2+ weeks of zero sightings. Over the past 3 days I have seen the juvenile Great Horned Owls many times. I suspect the parents are feeding them less and less. Thus, the owlets need to start hunting more on their own. I have even surprised one of the juveniles on the ground right at sunrise yesterday morning.

Yesterday afternoon, I heard the crow attack from my desk. It was hot outside … 90F. Hard to believe in just a few months it will be -25F. Anyhow, I went hiking over to my favorite pine grove and found one of the owlets, now almost fully grown. The owl was having a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day” (see Alexander). If the heat was not bad enough, the crows had found the poor bird and were pressing home their attack.

Great Horned Owl (juvenile) panting to beat the heat

For email subscribers, I forget to include the actual photographs of the Black-Backed Woodpeckers in my Greenwood Lake Forest Fire post. The images have been added to the online version. Sorry for the omission.

Back in mid February I found this year’s Great Horned Owl nest by taking evening hikes and listening for the hoots of owls in love. For three years I have followed the Amity Owls around the Lester / Amity Forest. However, for the past two weeks the owls had made themselves scarce, but that changed two days ago when the now almost fully grown owlets hooted in my yard at 1 am. At 5 am the hoot resumed, and 75 minutes before sunrise I found the owls hunting from the top of some nearby white pines.

Yesterday evening the owls started calling not too long after sunset, which told me a dawn hike was required for this morning. Jackpot! I found two of the five owls. I think the owlets are now only occasionally being fed by the parents, which forces the youngsters to hunt after sunrise till they hone their skills.

Regardless, it was fun to find my friends again this morning …