FeatherFlix Bird Video of the Week - Hawk Owl Hunting

Your Gift Subscriptions support FeatherFlix Bird Video of the Week. Give a Gift Subscription today -- only $10/year -- at http://bird-video.com/join.html FeatherFlix Bird Video of the Week - Hawk Owl Hunting by Michael Godfrey, Founder of FeatherFlix When you’re filming birds, luck is something you try to avoid because it’s usually bad. There’s no limit to what can go wrong. BUT … against all expectations, a Northern Hawk Owl gave me the most rewarding good luck of a lifetime of filming birds. I had traveled a thousand miles for a chance to see it, it found me -- sailed across in front of the windshield in full view -- gave me the needed seconds to deploy, then put on an Oscar-worthy kill performance before retiring to feast and digest. Northern Hawk Owl is not exactly a backyard regular. It haunts the forests of the far north across Alaska and Canada, into Europe and Asia. Its range is vast but numbers are thin -- perhaps 20,000 breeding pairs in North America, although remoteness prohibits an organized census. Science does not consider the Hawk Owl rare or endangered in the technical sense, but if you search for sightings on eBird, so far in 2022 there are six North American reports, all in the sensitive category so locations and dates are not available. I had lucked into my sole encounter with this mini-tiger of the taiga through grapevines and muttered hints which led me to a kindly Canadian birder. On February 20, 1989, I flew to Ottawa, rented a car, headed west into a snowstorm, hardly able to see the road. At a storage yard for cinder blocks where there had been a Hawk Owl hint, a bird crossed in front of me. The first impression was a Cooper’s Hawk, long tail, rounded wings, but it pitched onto a utility wire showing a big, owl-like head. I’m not sure what happened next but it probably involved sliding into the road shoulder, bailing out and mounting a 20 pound videotape camcorder onto a 30 pound tripod, finding the bird, focusing and frantically pushing buttons. The Hawk Owl repositioned to scan for a suspected rodent. The rodent made an ill-advised move and the owl sailed down to strike, skidded across the powder and plucked the rodent. In the video you can see the owl pause wingstrokes to get a better grip, then reach back to deliver a cervical bite. It recrosses the highway under a sign for Canada’s Capital Region, then vanishes into the woods and blowing snow. I was afraid to play the tape for fear of malfingering a button and erasing a video sequence I knew I could never duplicate. But the bird wasn’t through. A half mile further, there it was on a limb, glaring at the camera. Next - - I couldn’t believe this - - It closed its eyes, shook violently and coughed up a pellet. Has that been filmed before, I’m thinking? A Northern Hawk Owl regurgitating a bolus of fur and bones from a rodent it ate minutes ago? The whole scenario was too improbable to calculate; the bird revealing itself, the strike, the re-find, the pellet. A single bird, rare to me, in a wink had exhausted a lifetime’s good luck with a camera. But I’ll take it. # # The FeatherFlix FREE Bird Identification App is the only bird identification app based on bird video + synched audio of birds making their calls -- available at: AppStore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/feath... Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/de... Gift Subscriptions are only $10/year and make a great gift for the birder on your list! Your subscriptions keep the FeatherFlix App free. Purchase subscriptions today at http://bird-video.com/join.html. Thank you! Website: http://featherflix.com Twitter:   / featherflix1   Facebook:   / featherflix   Instagram:   / featherflix   Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/1426454... # # Copyright 2022 by Michael A. Godfrey. All Rights Reserved. For permission to reuse material from FeatherFlix Bird Video of the Week, to send corrections, or to submit your video, please contact us at [email protected] Thank You!