Capturing animals among us

This week’s assignment for You Capture was animals. Since I share photos of Ayla and our cats all the time, I didn’t want to share the same old stuff…and with very little effort, we managed to be in the right place at the right time to get some great animal captures. And we weren’t even in the zoo! 🙂

If you’d like to learn more about what You Capture is all about, find out what next week’s theme is or see more great photos from this week’s participants, head over to I Should Be Folding Laundry.

There are a lot of efforts in our area at the moment to increase the number of cranes living wild in the area. They’ve built nests and perches for them all over and have brought in some birds from other places to get started. Although we never used to see cranes a few year ago, now they are all over the place. So we were pretty thrilled to see a field with about 6 of them in it last weekend. Unfortunately, photographing them was not as easy as we would have liked. Ok, more learning to be done with the big zoom and action shots!

And when we went to the market on Saturday morning, there was a man walking around with an ENORMOUS Eagle Owl. He said it was only 4 months old and he was from a local wildlife preserve. I have to wonder if the bird is going to keep growing…because if it will, I think we should all be very afraid! He was absolutely gorgeous though and even let people pet him. But he was really transfixed on a Jack Russell that was hopping around. According to the handler, he used to have a best friend that was a Jack Russell…but now they only trust him to play with German Shepherd-size dogs. Maybe he and Ayla would be good friends?

Wow – I just realized that all my photos are actually of birds! I swear I didn’t plan that. But I couldn’t resist sharing this shot of one of the local chickens as well. It was just having a great time looking for bugs in the grass under these apple trees.

12 Comments

Carrie on October 14, 2010 at 1:20 pm

I love that owl shot! And the story too – playing with a Jack Russell? That’s too funny and somethiing I would like to see (or him “playing” with any dog actually!). The chicken is fun as well.

Tiffany on October 14, 2010 at 1:38 pm

Seriously! I was wondering how it worked with him and the German Shepherd also. Ayla would be either completely intimidated or start trying to pull out its feathers. But they seem to feel the Jack Russell is just way too small to be a good playmate now…since the owl is at least twice the dog’s size! I swear the owl wanted to eat the dog that was there bouncing around. But my owl body language really isn’t so sharp so perhaps that evil stare was a look of, “hey, let’s play some chase” 😉
Reply

Charliesommers on October 14, 2010 at 5:04 pm

Beautiful picture of an owl! They are my favorite of the raptors. The great horned owl is one of the world’s most beautiful birds.

I don’t have a digital camera so I can’t share pictures of some of the critters that have been visiting me lately but a very large opossum comes to our deck on a nightly basis to eat any food the cats may have left in their bowls.

We also have dozens of squirrels that spend their days burying acorns all over our yard with plans of digging them up in the winter when they are hungry. Of course they will forget where they buried most of them and the dampness of next spring will cause them to sprout. The squirrels don’t realize it but they are nature’s little gardeners and are probably responsible for more than one forest of mighty oaks.