Verreaux’s Eagle Owl, originally uploaded by andyskelton-a Blog a day http://andrewskelton.net.
Today has been a typical New Zealand day… four seasons in one day. With high winds, downpours, as well as baking sun, photography has been made more… erm, interesting than anticipated.
Actually today’s photography has been interesting anyway. As mentioned yesterday we visited the Hawk Conservancy. As the name suggests, the Centre specializes in all different type of birds of prey such as hawks, eagles, vultures, owls as well as kites.
I’ve only reviewed a few images off one of the cards I’ve used but I’m certainly pleased with what I’ve taken, and especially pleased as I tried a few new techniques which worked a treat. I’ll describe those as and when I post the photos.
Today’s photo is of one of the few Owl photos I took on this visit, a Verreaux’s Eagle Owl. If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time(well done you, for having such staying power), you may remember I’ve described before how you can tell when an owl is active. Most people think that all owls only come out at night, and in the case of the Verreaux’s Eagle Owl, this is true. There are, however, owls that hunt during the day (referred to as diurnal) as well as corpuscular which are those birds that hunt at dusk and dawn.
The trick to identifying which owl is which is, a part from seeing when they’re active, checking up on google or even looking in a .. what’s the work… erm… paper thing with lots of pages, words and possibly photos.. oh yes a magazine! (What about a Book? Ed.) is to look in to their eyes, not around the eyes. A you can see from today’s photo this owl has what appears to be solid black eyes – and this is the case for other nocturnal owls.
I hope you like raptors as I suspect they’re going to be making lots of appearances on the blog and flickr this week. What’s an owl’s favourite TV program? Dr Whoooooo. (I will promise that I will not attempt such a joke for the rest of the week!)
Andrew Skelton: 
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