The Owls Have It – Chill Travelers Paying Attention!

We have had a very busy 2015 so far.  It is sometime hard to manage our business and still maintain our Chill Travelers attempt to stay connected with things.  We call it paying attention.

tgo owlThere are many things about Florida’s Space Coast that most people do not know.  We are finishing up a project here, but we have tried to see and visit as many sights as we can during our time here.  Even though this is the beginning of our busy season, we still try to take notice of things along the way.

Cape Canaveral is well known for its rockets and space history.  These launch sites are in the middle of wild life preserves as is most of the region surrounding it.  Often people have a mental image of Florida being Orlando’s theme parks or Miami.  Much of Florida is rustic and home for many species of birds and animals.

We happened on an abandoned Osprey nest that has been used annually by returning birds.  This year a pair of great horned owl’s claimed it for their own.  We happened to look up a few days ago and there were two puffs that we made out.  We returned with binoculars and cameras and got the images below.  Those two white puffs turned out to be two great horned owl babies with their mom.

The nest is at the very top of a high tension power line near the St John’s river preserve.  The nest is noticeable with the naked eye, but unless you pay attention, stop and look, you miss things in life.  This one was well worth the 750 images we shot to get the few winner below.

For our photography buds, the images were shot with a Sony A7R 24 megapixel camera using an adapter and a vintage Nikon 500mm F8 mirror lens.  Handheld at 1/5000 of a second at ISO 1600

If we get any better images, we will add to these few.

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Here are some new pictures with the babies growing quite a bit in the last couple of weeks.

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Update 4-13-15

Babies are growing big.  Her next to dad is one of the babies who is very interested in the sound of our camera

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Below are some thumbnail images which you can click on to enlarge.

Here is a 3 minute video of the young owls with a parent.  Now out of the nest, they are growing and learning.

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