Much of my wintertime hiking is consumed by searching for burrowing owls. I’m extremely unsuccessful in this endeavor: I’ve only seen two burrowing owls, and none yet this winter. Last year most of my doomed burrowing owl expeditions took place at Hayward Shoreline. This year I’ve been stalking a burrowing owl at Coyote Hills. I know there is one there and I know about where to look for him, but his burrow is pretty far from the trail and I didn’t know EXACTLY where it was, so on my first attempt I took hundreds of photos of burrowing owl-colored rocks with my 400mm lens, playing the pictures back on the camera, and zooming in looking to see if any of the rocks were really owls. I had no luck.* However, I didn’t leave the park disappointed because look what I DID see!
* Or so I thought. In a funny/sad twist, when I got home and downloaded the photos, I was going through them in Lightroom, ready to reject the hundreds of rock photos, when something made me zoom in on the third rock photo and examine it more closely, and damn if I didn’t SEE THE OWL, siting next to its burrow, looking like a rock. I don’t know why or how I didn’t catch it in the field, and was pretty disconcerted that I had not, because in the one picture I got of him, he’s looking away from the camera. Had I realized he was there, I’d have concentrated on that particular burrow and tried to get a good picture of him. At least I learned exactly where his burrow IS, although I also learned that it’s so far away that a 400mm lens isn’t really going to cut it. Thus I have returned to Coyote Hills numerous times since then, armed with my heavy 150-600mm, AND HAVEN’T SEEN HIM SINCE. This is my life, people.
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