Barred Owl in FCPP - from the archives

No time to go out taking photos, so I dug into my archives again. I am adding the description from another photo I took at the same time and posted ages ago.

"Yesterday afternoon, 23 October 2014, I finally did a drive south of the city and found an old barn that I really wanted to see, plus a few others. The photos of this barn that I had found on the Internet must have been taken by trespassing, or possibly before a No Trespassing sign was placed there, or even wth permission, as I could only get a view of the back of the barn from the road, lol! On this drive, or rather when looking at Google Earth the previous evening, I discovered that as well as having no sense of direction, I also have no sense of distance!

Then I went in search of two grain elevators joined together by a long, low building. The most northerly one is one of the oldest in Alberta (built in 1905 I think, but certainly before 1909). I had pulled over and parked, taken a few shots right into the sun unfortunately and was just checking them back in the car. I was conscious of a man in a bright orange sweater approaching close to my car. When he stopped by my car, I opened the door – he seemed a bit puzzled as to what I was doing there, so I explained that I was photographing the elevators. Ha, it was the private owner of the elevators!!! I read on the Internet just now that he has a furniture manufacturing company in the long, low building that joins the two elevators together. I asked him if there was a better place to photograph them, and he said to take the previous little road. Much better! Some nice old train cars parked near them, too. I didn't realize that I was parked on private ground when the owner was talking with me!

After the elevators, I explored a few other roads further south and ended up not far from the Saskatoon Farm. Called in and had quiche again : )

Yesterday had started well, too. I found an e-mail from a friend, saying that they had just seen a Barred Owl in one of the local parks. I got over there just before noon and bumped into a few of my friends who had just finished a walk. Two of them said they would come with me and look for it again – and we found it!! This was the first 100% wild Barred Owl I’d ever seen. I had seen a family of them near Edmonton, when we went to see ones that had been banded. They were wild birds, but I still hoped to one day see a completely wild one (no nesting box). Yesterday’s owl was beautiful – crummy light, with a mix of harsh sunlight and dark shadows, but I did find one to post today. It was taken after the owl flew down to the ground from one tree, was out of sight briefly, and then we saw it in a somewhat closer tree.

"The Barred Owl’s hooting call, “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?” is a classic sound of old forests and treed swamps. But this attractive owl, with soulful brown eyes and brown-and-white-striped plumage, can also pass completely unnoticed as it flies noiselessly through the dense canopy or snoozes on a tree limb. Originally a bird of the east, during the twentieth century it spread through the Pacific Northwest and southward into California." From AllAboutBirds.

www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Barred_Owl/id

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barred_owl