On the evening of May 7th my sister and I were able to observe some burrowing owls in Central Montana. We visited the site earlier in the day when we were coming back from a different outing, but it was storming and I did not have all of my camera gear with me. We only saw two owls during our initial visit, but with the wind and rain coming in, we did not stay very long to look more closely. After it looked like the storms had passed for the day, we decided to take a chance and make the hour long drive back to the site to see if we could get a better look at the owls. Upon arriving at the site, it was still windy as the last of the storms were just leaving the area and we did not see any owls. But not long after, as the weather cleared, we started seeing several owls moving about the area. They were so active in fact, it was difficult to keep track of how many owls were present. Our best guess is there were somewhere between about 6 and 10 owls.
Burrowing owls are small birds and we were only able to get so close to them, as to not disturb them. I had my longest lens on (Canon 600mm F4 version 2) and I also attached my 1.4x Canon teleconverter (version 3) to try and bring them in as close as possible. Even with all of that glass, they were still very small in the frame of my Canon R5. With that in mind, I actually ended up concentrating more on trying to get some video footage. The Canon R5 has a crop mode in video, so I enabled that to try and make the owls as large as possible. I also attached my external Rhode VideoMic Pro+ microphone to try and capture the sounds of the owls. Please check out the video link at the end of this post so you can see and hear the owls around their burrows. I did try to take some still photos and I am including a few here, even though the quality is not the best. These photographs are heavily cropped, so the quality is severely degraded, but I still wanted to share them for illustrative purposes.
Burrowing Owl taking a walk. It looks like he was on a mission.
Burrowing owl looking into the camera. He did not seem very happy about having his picture taken.
Burrowing owl, giving me a bit of a side eye look.
A pair of burrowing owls in the entrance of their burrow.
We only had about an hour with the owls by the time the weather moved out, so there was not a lot of daylight to work with. It was still worth the trip though, as it was one of my goals this year to try to locate and photograph some burrowing owls. I plan to revisit the site to try and get some better photographs. I am hoping if I had more time on the site, I might have the opportunity to get the owls a little closer for some better pictures. I am also hoping later on this spring, that perhaps I can observe some chicks as well, which would be a first for me.
A burrowing owl perched on a sage brush plant against the settings sky.