kszafrajda's Journal

I went out to my local park multiple times before one day hearing the faint rolling call of a screech owl. It was mid morning and no matter where I looked I could not locate him/her. I went back that night and again heard the familiar call over and over until last of the day light had dwindled, then with the poorest of light I spotted a small brown ball flying through the air - It was in fact the screech owl that had been teasing me with calls. I had my nikon z9 with the 180mm-600mm hand held and did my best to capture an image or two that would be proof of this spectacular experience. I shot at 1/60sec and cranked the ISO up to 10000, certainly not ideal settings but needs must! I got home and immediately ran my images through my editing software..... I was elated to see that after applying denoise in camera raw the image was better than acceptable. Five days later I was out birding for warblers during the morning and once again heard the familiar sound of a screech owl trill ... in the same location as the previous observation. Once again I retuned one hour before sunset and set up my camera on my tripod ... I was determined to get stella images. at 19:38 I hear a rustle of wings to my right - I turned around and strained my vision to scan the branches and managed to locate a blob ... I checked with my binos and lo and behold it was the screech owl. I proceeded to adjust the settings for the light and obtain images. To my surprise it was a red morph. Two screech owls in the same tree, a grey and a red morph ... my fairy godmother waved her magic wand twice!