I promised some surprise photographs in my last post and we’ll be into them shortly.  Yesterday I was driving my wife through the neighborhood on our way to the store when some movement in a neighbor’s cedar tree got my attention.  I focused just in time to see a large wing protrude from behind a branch.  I backed my car around the corner (technically illegal in most jurisdictions!), parked in front of the neighbors house and got out of my car to investigate.  Fortunately I didn’t have to ask permission to trespass as the neighbor had seen me and come out of the house to see what I was doing.  A little moving around garnered us an angle where we could see a Barred owl in her tree.

For at least a year we’ve heard owls calling in the Cap Sante neighborhood.  I had other neighbors call me once when an owl was adjacent to their house, but it flushed as I crept around the house for a photo.  But this experience would be different and allow me to finally obtain some good photographs of the owl.

I rushed home and obtained my camera and returned and took over forty photos of the bird.  When I returned from the store it was still there but flew shortly after I arrived.  However my wife passed the location a couple of hours later and she said it was back.  I was hopeful that it might lay up there every day, but there was no sign of it this morning.  So without further tale, I give you one of our neighborhood Barred owls…

It was a great day for photography and the photography part of my day ended with the Barred owl.  But… the birding part of my day hadn’t ended.  At home in my office later in the afternoon my wife called to me that there was a warbler in the front yard.  Sightings had been meager over the past several weeks, but I looked out my office window and spied a Golden-crowned kinglet… and a lot of other bird activity.  I stepped out on my balcony and almost immediately saw a Brown creeper making its way up a dead tree in the yard and then soon after that I saw what was very clearly an Orange-crowned warbler.  Sorry, no photos of these birds but their presence may mean I’m back in the yard photography ‘business’.