I'm back - Great Gray Owls

After having both lungs full of blood clots, spending a week in the hospital and eight weeks in bed at home, I have finally been cleared to enjoy hiking, photos and birding.  I will go back to teaching school on March 3.  That gives me three more weeks to heal and get in shape to punish those kids.

Yesterday I found two Great Gray owls and today I found a total of four.  The recent cold weather (minus 17) and then two days of snow appears to have brought them down to the river bottoms.  Here are a few shots of these beautiful birds.

Here one shakes the whole body as if it was a dancer.

Flying over a meadow, this Great Gray locates a rodent.

After it swallows the rodent whole, it flies right past me and lands in a tree just 20 feet from me.

Blessed with two sets of eye lids, this one blinks the clear eye lids that appears to be blue contacts.

This Great Gray is taking a bath cleaning one feather at a time.  If a feather came out while being cleaned, the feather was eaten.

A royal predator. After watching them from seven hours in two days and shooting over 2000 photos, I learned a lot about the Great Grays and plan on spending more hours with them.

Just a couple more wild days in Idaho and looking for a lot more.