After my friend Sharon and I hiked around Adams County Regional Park photographing birds yesterday, she asked me if I wanted to try to find some burrowing owls that she had discovered a few days earlier. Of course, I did.

So we drove about 15 miles due east of the park, where we found them. These owls actually live within the city limits of Denver at the edge of Denver International Airport, the biggest American airport (and second biggest in the world) in land area.

Burrowing owls here generally nest and roost in burrows that prairie dogs excavate, and these are no exception. Sharon and I spent several hours watching them. We were able to get as close as about 70 feet from their burrow home.

We found a new family. Mama and papa owls has a brood of nine owlets, all about a month old.

When we arrived, we found another photographer there before us — long before us. Mike, an advanced amateur photographer from nearby Thornton, Colorado, had been spending hours almost every day for the past three weeks photographing the family. Such patience I am only beginning to learn.

Sharon and I stayed only for a couple of hours yesterday. I took more than 500 photos of the owls.

But I knew that I could do better today, so I went back. Sharon had something else to do, so this time I went alone, except Mike got there about an hour after I did.

Yesterday I didn’t have my 1.4 tele extender. Even though I used my 400 mm lens, I needed the 560 mm reach that the tele extender would give me, which is effectively 896 mm, since my camera body has a 1.6 crop factor.

Also, with that setup I needed to use my heavier tripod rather than my lightweight hiking tripod that I used yesterday. Further, I had forgot to bring my cable release and forgot to turn off the lens image stabilization.

And I wanted to get to the owls’ burrow earlier for the better light at that time. So I got up at 4 a.m. this morning, arriving just before sunrise at 5:31, when I started shooting. At that time only mama owl was up. An hour later the babies started coming out of the burrow, and I have enough patience now that I stayed for another couple of hours.

Mama at Sunrise

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Three Owlets

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Mama and Five Owlets

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Face-off with a Prairie Dog over the Burrow

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Mama Defends Her Babies and the Burrow

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