Boreal owl with red-backed vole.

I have been continuing to keep track of the little boreal owl in Slana.  Its calling is falling off.  I no longer hear it in the daylight hours though my friend still reports hearing it during trips to the outhouse late at night. Less calling means it is much harder to locate but I am still finding it in the thick dark woods by searching an area of about one hundred yards by two hundred yards.  This small area seems to be its preferred daytime roosting area.  Slowly walk back and forth through the spruce and poplar forest and scanning every tree I find it about 30 percent of the time.  Once I was guided to its location by the calling of a couple upset boreal chickadees.  It is never in the same perch.

Finding the boreal owl is not easy but getting a good picture in its dark day roost is a real challenge. Many of the photographs I had previously taken of the owl were under rather poor lighting conditions.  Without direct light its big yellow eyes were poorly illuminated and most photographs failed to adequately illustrate this important quality.  The owl usually perches about ten to twenty feet high so I brought in a ladder to get to its level and I also brought along an electronic flash to put a little better light on the subject.  For the accompanying photographs I used a Nikon D3s camera with a 17-35mm zoom lens. Prior to photographing the owl, I took numerous test shots to work out the exposure. First set aperture and shutter speed for the highlights (sunlit spruce trees and sky.) Make sure you don’t exceed the camera flash sync shutter speed, usually 1/250 of a second. Next, adjust your flash output for the subject distance, making sure you don’t over expose with the flash.  For that I tested the flash on a spruce trunk. The owl didn’t seem to mind a few shots even though my camera was as close as one foot away and the explosion of light from the flash must surely have temporarily blinded it.  But if I persisted it would soon become annoyed and fly off.

Boreal owl perches in thick, dark spruce forest during the day.