Exploring Kootenay Lake

The Pygmy Owl is our smallest owl. In the warmer months, it lives high in the mountains, but sometimes it visits the valleys in the winter. This year, there are many Pygmy Owls here and I have treated them in four postings. The Pygmy is unusual in a few ways: in addition to being our smallest owl, it is active during the day and hunts by sight.

The Great Grey Owl is our largest owl. Although it is found mainly to our north, many years it will spend a few weeks hunting for food in the occasional meadows along the North Arm of the Lake. This year, it is here, so Cynthia and I visited to watch it.

In planning some postings on the Great Grey Owl, it struck me that pictures of these two winter owls could be deceptive: independent of size, we have the critter nearly filling the frame. So, relative size is not revealed. This initial posting corrects that. First I show the two owls with their standard frame-filling pictures. Then a composite shows the approximate relative sizes of the two of them. 

Subsequent postings will just present the Great Grey: as it hunts from a perch, as it flies, and, as it catches a meal. Interestingly, both the Pygmy Owl and the Great Grey Owl enjoy eating voles.

Our smallest owl is the Pygmy Owl.  

Our largest owl is the Great Grey Owl. In these pictures, size is not apparent.

This is a composite picture of our largest owl, the Great Grey Owl (left) and our smallest owl, the Pygmy Owl (right), both flying. They are strikingly different in size.

Some winters, I hardly see even one Pygmy Owl. This year, I cannot stop seeing them. We saw three different ones in a short time yesterday.

It gave me the opportunity to try photographing one in flight.

As daytime hunters, Pygmy Owls have sharp vision for locating prey. So they can obviously see humans wandering nearby. The Pygmy Owl certainly knew we were watching it, but as we were neither a suitable predator nor prey, it just seemed to ignore us.

Of course, while it will always fly off to snare prey, it would often time its departure for when we looked away or had gone. It is as if it wanted to hide its next location from observers. So, photographing one flying was a problem.

There were many pictures of owls sitting and hunting, but only one so-so shot of an owl  flying off. Ah well.

Here is one of the Pygmy Owls when it was hunting.

It flew off rapidly, but for less that a second, it was still sort of in focus (and still watching).

After showing a male Pileated Woodpecker foraging on a piling a couple of weeks ago <https://blog.kootenay-lake.ca/?p=33997>, Cynthia found another foraging pileated. This new one was a female. So, I am showing both.

First, I will reproduce the male from the two-weeks old posting. It has a reddish malar strip (from bill down to neck). Its red cap also extends to its bill. 

Second, here is Cynthia’s shot of the female from the latest observation. The malar strip is black (not reddish) and the red crest stops above the eye. The darker eye colour seems to be only a result of the age of the bird, not its sex.

This shot of the female shows the red crest stopping well above the bill, and the dark malar strip. But, the real reason it is included is that it is an unusual view.

Some winters, I have been able to photograph a Pygmy Owl. 

This small owl spends most of its year at high elevations, but sometimes seeks the valleys in the winter. Unusually, it hunts by day and will sit quietly for hours on a tree branch waiting to fly after a small bird or maybe a vole. Then it has a quick dive to catch its prey.

However, in many winters of watching, I have never seen it fly after something. All my shots are just of the owl sitting and watching. That is, until yesterday when I watched the Pygmy Owl go after a small bird. The bird escaped, but I managed an acceptable shot of it diving after it.

A Pygmy Owl dives after a small bird, claws at the ready.

This may well be one of the first Pygmy Owls in the valley this winter. They spend their summers in the high mountains where they are rarely seen. They are sometimes with us at the valley bottoms in the winter. 

This Pygmy Owl was hunting (for small birds) from a tree.

Yesterday, I was watching a Pileated Woodpecker scrounge for grubs and ants in a piling. I took many pictures hoping to capture something interesting, but in the end, I only show one image and the bird is just sitting there. Its activity was interesting enough, but a question kept arising: what sex is the bird?

Now the standard way to determine the sex of a Pileated Woodpecker is to look at its malar stripe. This is the line angling back from the bird’s bill separating the cheek from the throat — sort of a moustache. If this is red, the pileated is male; if it is black, the pileated is female. Sometimes it is as simple as that. But, sometimes the malar strip is dim and inconsistent. Now what?

Yes, there is something else.

Here is the one picture from yesterday’s shoot of the Pileated Woodpecker. What colour is the malar strip?

Here is a 2011 shot of a female pileated. The malar strip is black, but there is something else: the bird’s red crest ends above the eye. From there to the beak it is black. It turns out that this shortened appearance of the crest is another indication of a female.

Now we return to the a blowup of the original picture. On the male, the red crest extends almost to the beak. In the blowup, the redness of the malar strip is also more evident, but it is dark. This bird is a male as revealed by both the crest and the malar strip.