Barred Owl

This guy had been whoo whooing in my woods for several days. Usually all I ever see of it, is it swooping through the woods. I finally got lucky. I saw it land. It was quite far away, silhouetted against late afternoon sun, but my new Canon SX 30 IS with its 35x optical zoom proved its worth. Focused well through the trees, had good low light exposure, great image stabilization, and sufficient megapixels that I could crop it to this size. Good thing too, because he swooped off before I could take a second photo. (IMG_0500)