Favoritos de ryanvanmeter

Continuing Barred Owl. Owl was napping in one of its usual perches. Suddenly, it started moving around a lot. I thought maybe I was being too loud or something, but then the Owl turns around and pulls a dead Star-nosed Mole out of the snag. The Owl then spends a good 12 minutes eating the Mole right there in front of me. After finishing his mole meal, the Owl returned to his normal sitting position in the perch, and continued napping. I never knew they stored food for later outside of nesting season, this was a treat to see!

Watched this great blue heron from a distance, with beautiful plumage, fishing in deep water up to its belly. It caught a very large fish, brought it to shore, swallowed it over a period of 10 seconds or so. Once the heron re-entered the water a few feet from shore, it began to croak/grunt and stab its beak towards something in the water. After only a few stabs, the heron was unable to move, the bobcat emerged from the water and brought it to shore, with the heron grunting often. Before the heron was even dead, the bobcat began carrying it back out towards the tree line, having a difficult time walking due to the size of the bird. From the first photo to the last, it was only a minute.

First time seeing this species in this location, and after the mobbing it received, probably the last.
Owl was consistently mobbed by crows (and one raven) for over an hour. After finding them at 8:30am, I tailed them around the forest, the crows were pretty relentless until finally calming down a little at around 10am. Always a bummer to see such an intense mob.

Continuing owl. I spent from 11:40am to 5:30pm with this bird on this day. It ate 4 snakes: 1 huge one, and 3 smaller ones. It was 4/7 in hunting tries (4 successes, 3 tries came up empty handed). It was mostly hunting from 11:40 to around 4pm, and then napped from around 4pm to 5:30pm. At 5:30 it stretched and preened and flew off deeper into the woods, at which time I ceased birding.

Throughout the day, many people stopped to observe the bird. This owl is chill as hell and seems to be very used to human presence. I think it uses the bike path traffic as a way to find prey that gets stirred up. Awesome bird.