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In my woods. Indianapolis, Marion County, Indiana.
The best, most intimate photos that I got of the adult barred owls were within the first three days after the youngsters left the nest tree. Perhaps they were working harder to keep track of the kids and also keep them fed. In any case, there were two evenings well before dark when one of the owls was down low near my bird feeders. I'm quite sure it was hoping that it could catch some feeder birds to feed the young owlets. During this time, the adult owl was VERY approachable. I shot these with my 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x extender. The shots are cropped a little but not much, so you can see that I was quite close to the owl. And as you can also see in this photo, the owl was so comfortable with me nearby that it took time for a little nap!
Specs:
Intel 6700k @4.7Ghz
32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 RAM
MSI Z170A Gaming Pro Carbon
GTX 980Ti Strix SLI (added after i took this pic)
Corsair AX1200i
Custom painted by my dad
Spotted Owls are getting harder to find, in part because of the extension of the range of the Barred Owl into Northern California. These owls can be pretty confiding, as long as you are reasonably quiet. This one perchedf right over a popular hiking trail, so close that I had trouble viewing it with my scope. Photo is uncropped. Bird was not only hidden in the redwood branches, but it was so dark I had to boost the ISO to 200 (any more is too noisy), and the exposure still took more than one second! He opened the left eye to check out the passing dogwalkers, but still seemed half asleep.