Owls — Blog — Josh Rutledge Photography

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.

On the morning of February 6, 2022, I drove about an hour east of my home to meet my sister to look for Snowy Owls. Finding Snowy Owls was on my list of goals for this winter. I had also wanted to try and photograph Great Gray Owls this winter, but I have not been successful yet. The conditions in town were warm and dry when I left, but by the time I got about 30 miles out of town the roads turned very icy. I am not sure if it was new snowfall overnight that froze or if it was blowing snow that had recovered the roads. I had to slow down, but I still made it to our designated meeting location on time without issue.

We were probably looking for about a half an hour when my sister spotted our first snowy owl. It was on the edge of a stubble field not far off the road we were traveling on. I would guess we were probably still about 100 yards away when she spotted it. With it being so close to the road, we did not want to scare it, so we stopped and I took a few stills and some video from the car. It was too far away to realistically get any good photos, but we were not sure how long it would stick around, so I figured I better at least get a few pictures for documentation if nothing else. I was shooting with my Canon R5 and my Canon 600mm F4 II. I forgot my extender, or I might have considered putting it on. After we watched it for a while we decided to see if we could get any closer. The owl was along the road we needed to travel along anyway, so we figured it was worth taking a chance by getting a little closer. We were able to get a little bit closer, but it ended up flying away while we were still pretty far away. It did not fly real far, but it was still too far away for good photography. We continued down the road a little farther and we stopped to look around a little bit and I spotted a 2nd snowy owl sitting on the railroad tracks. This owl was even farther away than the first. So we just observed it with our binoculars for a while.

Slightly different pose of the first Snowy Owl we saw along the road.

I had already been out unsuccessfully a couple of times this winter looking for Snowy Owls, so to see two owls in less than an hour was really awesome. I was a little disappointed we had not been able to find one closer though. We continued to look around the countryside and after a little while we stumbled upon a third owl that was sitting out in the middle of a field. This owl was also too far away for any good photographs. When we first saw it, we were not 100% sure if it was one of the first owls we saw that had moved, or if it was a third. After we watched this owl for a while, we decided to go back and check where we saw the first two. Sure enough, those two owls were still where we left them, so we could confirm we had seen 3 Snowy owls.

Eventually we decided that the owls were not going to cooperate and give us any closer views so we decided to call it a day. We did not want to harass the birds by trying to get too close. Seeing three Snowy Owls in one morning was still an awesome experience and I was able to cross off one of my winter goals. Hopefully the owls will stick around a little bit longer so I can get a chance to try again for some better pictures. All of the photographs and video were cropped to try and showcase the birds. As a result they are not very high resolution. As the morning went on (it was abnormally warm for February) I was starting to get some heat distortion in my pictures as well, which further degraded the image quality. Since the owls were white, there were white patches of snow in many of the scenes and the sky was relatively bright I was shooting with between 2/3 and a full stop of positive exposure compensation to correct my exposures.