Long-eared owls

A couple of weeks ago I spent a night down near Prosperous hoping to get a sighting of a family of long-eared owls that my mate Steve had discovered some time previous.  I met him down there and he took me to the site which is a few miles from the town.

It was about 9.30 when we got into position, and according to Steve we'd have to wait 'till about 10.30 for the family to appear, this he said was usually the time when the young would start calling and the mother would respond by periodically bringing food to them.

Dusk fell, the hands on the watch rolled around to 10.30 and just as Steve predicted the young began to call.  Brilliant, they were still present and with any luck we may get a show! 

Well, we got a show and a half.  Three young appeared out of the trees and perched on the walls of a ruin not 25 meters away from us.  In the fading light we got great views of the three young shuffling about the wall and calling loudly, presumably for the parents to bring them food.  This went on for perhaps 30 minutes at which point we heard a more distant call from behind the trees the young had come from and the mother (we presume) made her first appearance of the night.

What followed was a sequence of hectic activity, the young flying around and through the ruins, playfully and in full view for much of the time.  The little tufts on top of their heads sometimes just about visible against the backdrop of the darkening sky when they stopped for a breather and perched back up on the walls.  Eventually as the light was becoming just a little too dark to see very much unless they were in flight they moved further across the field to another ruin which gave us great views of them in flight.  They proceeded to replicate their behaviour of earlier and began flying in and about the second ruin in much the same way as before.

We hung around a little longer as we could still make them out against the night sky when they took flight, but alas the time came when it didn't look like they were going to head back in our direction and so content with what we had seen and heard we called it a night, packed up and headed home.

It was without doubt one of my top birding experience this year, I mean it doesn't always work out that you plan a trip and the intended decides to turn up and show for you, so to have three young and at least one parent decide to put on a show for a couple of hours was way above my expectations for the night.

Birding bliss...