Monday, July 21, 2025

You Can Call Me Owl

Juvenile American Barn Owls

My life-long approach to wildlife photography got turned on its head last month by a baby owl.

As a photographer I want to create images that convey a personal connection with my subject, while avoiding any real-life personal interaction that would be stressful for the animal. That usually means using long lenses and keeping a respectful distance.

For several weeks I've been watching and photographing a family of Barn Owls nesting in a palm tree in downtown Benicia. The nest itself was well-hidden and protected until early June when a crew arrived and trimmed off most of the tree’s branches. Suddenly the nest was completely exposed - a boon for local photographers and birders but a precarious situation for the five little owlets.


A litter of Barn Owls

The Barn Owl paparazzi

On June 20 I arrived at the nest for another photo session. I wasn’t surprised to see that Ok Kyong Hanrahan, a friend and fellow member of First Street Arts, had also just arrived with her camera. What I didn’t expect was that one of the owlets had fallen from the nest and was now huddled on the sidewalk at the base of the tree.


Uh-oh. What now?

Suddenly my “keep your distance and let nature take its course” rule no longer seemed relevant. After all, it was human activity that had exposed the nest to danger in the first place. Now we were looking at a baby owl in a potentially life-threatening situation, and we felt we needed to get involved.

The bird appeared unhurt and we knew the adults would continue feeding it wherever it was, but we were concerned for its safety. Benicia’s coyotes are well-known, and even an encounter with a cat or a raccoon could be fatal for a little owl that can’t yet fly. Ok and I both started calling wildlife rescue centers.

I was the first to get a call back, from Lindsay Wildlife Experience in Walnut Creek. After a series of phone calls and texts with both Lindsay Wildlife and Bay Raptor Rescue, I was advised to capture little Owl Sharptalon, keep him or her warm and safe overnight, and come to Lindsay’s wildlife hospital first thing in the morning. Ok kept an eye on the bird while I went home to get a suitable container, and Owl Pacino was soon settled in my office for the night – safe and warm, but certainly confused, scared, and hungry. My granddaughters could not have been more thrilled, and wanted to keep Weird Owl Yankovic as a pet.


  

Saturday morning was busy at the wildlife hospital. In just the twenty minutes or so that it took me to deliver Owl Franken and fill out the paperwork, I saw people bring in a gopher snake trapped in garden netting, a baby opossum that a dog had picked up, a Great Horned Owl stuck in a piece of fencing, a crow with a broken wing, an injured woodpecker, and an unidentified baby songbird.


  

I was given a receipt and a phone number I could call for updates. On Monday I learned that Owl Capone had been injured in the fall from the nest, needed four stitches for a cut, and was dehydrated, probably from not eating for at least 24 hours. A few days later I received another update – our little friend was gaining weight and healing nicely.

Meanwhile, back at the nest, more people seemed to be gathering each day to watch the owl family grow up, and some of them had heard the story of the fallen chick. I wrote a story for our local paper, the Benicia Herald, which ran on Sunday's front page.

 

The quintessential small-town paper

The four other siblings, of course, have continued to grow up and are beginning to fledge. One seems to have left already, while the other three are making exploratory flights around the neighborhood each night and staying close to the nest tree to sleep during the day. It won’t be long before they have all moved out to start families of their own.


Siblings can be a real nuisance sometimes


This nest is getting crowded!

Leaving the nest

Evening flight

And an update: I just spoke with the rehabber, who told me that after two weeks of living in a "hack box" - a sort of halfway house for recovering raptors - Owl Gore has been released and is getting on with the business of being a Barn Owl. 


Whooooo are you looking at? (Just kidding. Barn Owls don't give a hoot - they screech.)

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Galápagos Diary, Day 15

Day 15, April 26: Leaving Galápagos

First thing this morning we gathered our bags and headed straight for the airport at Baltra. LOL, just kidding. Sunrise is at 6:00 and our flight to Quito didn’t leave until 10:22, giving us just enough time for one more wet landing. In a small lagoon near Bachas Beach, on Santa Cruz Island, we photographed two flamingoes, a Black-necked Stilt with four chicks, and one last marine iguana.


Juvenile American Flamingo

Black-necked Stilt with chick

How many birds do you see?

Black-necked Stilt chick

American Flamingo

Marine Iguana

On the beach we found the tracks of a sea turtle that had laid her eggs just a couple hours earlier. It felt like the right way to say goodbye to Galápagos before joining the crowds at the airport.


Sea Turtle tracks

Tonight in Quito we will have one last dinner together, though it won’t be the same without Tui and Monica. Early tomorrow morning we will board our flight for Miami and then home.


Baltra Airport

Epilogue

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing my photos and reading my stories. What started as a simple email to a small group of friends and family while I was traveling somehow evolved into a major project that has taken much longer than I had planned.

And it’s not really done yet. I’m writing this in September, five months after my Galápagos trip, and I’m still editing the photos.

I shot more than 80,000 exposures, most of them in bursts of between five and fifty (at twenty per second). I'm on track to delete about 95 percent, and maybe half of what I keep will be good enough to add to my web site. So when someone asks, “how many pictures did you take?”, the fun answer is 80,000 but the honest answer is 2,000.

In our fifteen days on the Tip Top IV we visited 18 islands, going ashore on 15 of them. We photographed the other three from the boats.

I came home with photos of at least 38 species of birds (in addition to the 23 species I photographed at Mount Antisana before the trip officially started), 12 species of reptiles, two mammals (three if you count the whale skeletons), five invertebrates, and a bunch of fish. Most of them are animals I had never seen before and many I had never heard of.

My traveling companions were interesting and we got along well. The food on the yacht was very good; the cabins were small but adequate. The days were full, the photography was often difficult and at other times absurdly easy, and I went to bed each night completely exhausted.

Would I do it again? Of course I would. In fact, I’ve already booked my next trip for 2026.





Day 1: Photographers meet Galápagos

Day 2: We meet some new species

Day 3: Don't forget to preheat your camera!

Day 4: More snorkeling, more boobies, and our first snakes

Day 5: Eruption!

Day 6: Tortoises! Flamingoes!

Day 7: A trip to the Post Office

Day 8: Aw, poop!

Day 9: Imagining the past

Day 10: I need a break!

Day 11: The big city

Day 12: Iguana lips

Day 13: Lotsa lava

Day 14: Red sand, a mockingbird pedicure, and lizard sex

Day 15: Leaving Galápagos

Galápagos Diary, Day 14

Day 14, April 25: Red sand, a mockingbird pedicure, and lizard sex

Our last full day in Galápagos started on a beautiful red sand beach on Rábida Island. The sand felt great on my bare feet, except for the sharp pebbles that seemed to appear when I least expected them.


Rábida Island

As I walked along the sand a very friendly mockingbird arrived and gave me a pedicure, and shortly after I shot a few R-rated photos of lava lizards. Just a normal day in Galápagos.


Mockingbird pedicure

Can we have a little privacy here?

There was a small population of marine iguanas here, and we got some nice photos of them on the rocks and in the water. Tui mentioned that our group seems especially committed to the belief that every iguana must be photographed, to which one person replied, “What’s your point?” It wasn’t me who said that but it could have been. Iguanas are pretty special animals, and if you’re patient they will usually give you a photogenic pose.


Marine Iguana emerging from the water

Feeding at low tide

Finding a good basking spot

Waiting for his ship to come in

After lunch we had our final snorkeling session. Soon after I jumped into the water I saw something zoom past me and circle back around. It was a penguin! I swam in circles for the next several minutes as I watched it chasing and catching small fish. At one point it came up for air right next to me, so I came up as well. For a second or two we were face to face, just inches apart, and then it was back to chasing fish. It doesn’t seem fair to call penguins flightless after seeing how skillfully they use their wings underwater. (And again, I'm definitely not an underwater photographer. Yet.)


Galápagos Penguin

In the evening we were joined by the crew for a farewell drink. Tui made a short speech, in English and again in Spanish, thanking them for their amazing effort, and handed the captain a fat envelope containing our pooled tips, which will be divided equally among the seven of them.

After dinner we watched a 20-minute video that Monica made, showing the highlights of each day of the trip. It was at times funny, beautiful, hokey, and very sweet. We will all receive copies of it.





Day 1: Photographers meet Galápagos

Day 2: We meet some new species

Day 3: Don't forget to preheat your camera!

Day 4: More snorkeling, more boobies, and our first snakes

Day 5: Eruption!

Day 6: Tortoises! Flamingoes!

Day 7: A trip to the Post Office

Day 8: Aw, poop!

Day 9: Imagining the past

Day 10: I need a break!

Day 11: The big city

Day 12: Iguana lips

Day 13: Lotsa lava

Day 14: Red sand, a mockingbird pedicure, and lizard sex

Day 15: Leaving Galápagos