Flown the coop

It is summer time and I have found myself too busy to take the time and write to the blog.  I really do not know how some people write daily, or even several times a day.  Summer means hiking, biking, camping, and canoeing.  I sit behind a computer enough at work as it is.

Time to catch up.  I never finished posting about the owls that nested in our back yard.  About a week or two after the first post, they flew from the nest.  Here is a picture of one of the babies on its first night out.

He was in a tree about 4 feet of the ground.  I walked up to it and stared him right in the eye while he stood stone still.  For the next few days, they lived in the woods just on the edge of my yard.  I learned to call like the mother owl and the babies always called back to me.  It made it easy to locate them.  Here is a picture of them sleeping during the day, about 20 feet up in the trees.

The baby is hiding behind the large branch.  The mother had three babies, of which two survived.  I found the one who didn't make it and could not find any thing broken about it.  I can only assume it fell from the nest and was injured internally.

We enjoyed watching them eat and hoot at night and I hope that we'll see them again next spring.