• Recent Posts

    • Wee Owl
    • The Journey
  • Like Me On Facebook

    Facebook Pagelike Widget
0
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Shop
Owls
Wee Owl

February 21, 2020

As I was walking at Seal Point park in San Mateo along the San Francisco Bay one day with my dogs, Minnie and Noodle, I spied, with my owl-vision eyes*, a wee owl.

Almost immediately, I recognized the 6-inch tall bold yellow-eyed mini-raptor for who he was: A burrowing owl. What didn’t make sense was why he was just standing in the middle of a rock near the bay, and why he didn’t seem spooked by me in the least**.

Well, as luck would have it (actually not so much luck since I bring it almost everywhere I go), I had ‘fancy pants’ camera (a friend’s name for my Sony Alpha 6400) and my 300 mm lens. So, I snapped away. Just so you know how exciting seeing one of these guys is to me in the wild, the only other time I saw burrowing owls was at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago when I was in my early 20’s. At that time, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – they are just so unbelievably cute. That’s also how I was able to identify him. I returned again and again to the bay with my dogs and every time I came, Saturday after Saturday, he was there, in the same exact spot, for about a month and a half.

Burrowing Owl at San Francisco Bay

‘Wee Owl,’ as I have named him, remains on that rock as of 4 days ago, when he returned after a 3 week hiatus. I was a tad worried that he was absent from his rock for awhile, since the weather had gotten crazy and the bay was churning from the high winds recently. I thought perhaps his house had gotten flooded out. But there he was again on Sunday, just posing for me.

Short video of Wee Owl with my barking dogs in the background

*Thanks to two bird watcher/enthusiasts, Lisa and Dawn, who I see at Fort Funston while photographing horned owls, I feel I’ve developed ‘owl vision’ where I can see them. I never could before, they could be 2 feet in front of me and I would not know they were there.

**Since then, I have learned from a wildlife expert that burrowing owls really stand their ground, and don’t like to move, and are pretty territorial. So unless I get within about an arm’s length of Wee Owl, he’s not going anywhere.

Continue Reading

Uncategorized
The Journey

January 6, 2019

I have always loved cameras. When I was a kid though, I couldn’t have one. When I got to adulthood, I had a series of inexpensive cameras and have a lot of fun photos to show for it. But none of them have much value except to me and the other people in them. It didn’t occur to me to take photos of anything except humans during various special occasions.

Flash forward to the digital era. Now, now without the need to develop film! Exciting times – I got a little Canon one-shot and had a great time with it. That it took passable video as well used to blow my mind. In 2004, I used a Panasonic video cam and the one-shot to create a music video. But eventually even those went the way of the dinosaur. I was thrilled when I got my first smartphone (android) and it took even better video.

It continues to amaze me that technology allows anyone to create their own digital media, including video, photos, music, animation, and more.

But it’s been only recently, within the last couple of years, that I’ve decided to get serious about photography and video. So I took a documentary film course and a photography course at UMass while working on my degree (I went back to college after a 30 year hiatus). And I have been so incredibly pulled in by it. It’s a chance to connect with nature and beauty that surpasses anything else I’ve experienced, thanks to being fortunate enough, at least for now, to live near the Pacific ocean and take jaunts out to magnificent natural habitats and splendid animals and foliage.

And so the journey continues.

Continue Reading

  • Recent Posts

    • Wee Owl
    • The Journey
  • Recent Comments

    • Mary on Harbor Seals and Crashing Waves
  • Archives

    • February 2020
    • January 2019
  • Categories

    • Owls
    • Uncategorized
  • Meta

    • Log in
    • Entries feed
    • Comments feed
    • WordPress.org


  • Archives

    • February 2020
    • January 2019
  • Subscribe to Blog via Email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 62 other subscribers


© Copyright Mary Vogt Digital Art 2019