An Adventure with Our Smallest Owl

I devote most of my free time to nature photography, so after a phone call from an acquaintance it didn’t take long before I was sitting in the car, looking forward to new experiences in the forest. On the phone I got only the bare minimum of information, but the essential bit was: “We’re going to watch a pygmy owl nest – are you in?”

As I had done countless times before, I packed my camera bag and off we went. My colleague and I met halfway to the site, where he told me more about what lay in store. Besides me, German filmmakers who were shooting a documentary about our nature for Slovak and German television were also due to visit the site.

To my delight the nesting site was fairly easy to reach, and I didn’t have to feel like a Sherpa on Everest with a load on my back. When we finally made it up the hill, I was given the task of guessing where the nest was. This wasn’t difficult at all, as there was only one old trunk on the steep slope, and a closer look through binoculars revealed the entrance to a cavity.

With the speed (but not the elegance) of a Tatra chamois I scrambled up the slope and was soon unpacking my “bits and pieces”. As the nest was in the forest, there wasn’t much light to spare. My colleague told me it was the nest of a Eurasian pygmy owl and that the young had just under a week before they would fledge. Straight away I pictured portraits of this little owl peeping out of its hole. So I took up my battle position to capture exactly that kind of moment. After a few minutes the lady of the house called for the first time. That distinctive whistle put us on high alert. As if on purpose, the filmmakers arrived at that very moment, so my colleague went to help them carry their gear up the hill – I stayed at my post. As soon as he had gone, all I saw was a gracefully gliding shadow approaching the cavity. The lady of the house was back from hunting. The excitement grew, knowing that our leading lady was now where she was supposed to be. It wasn’t long before I saw big eyes peering out. At first it was just a quick peek and straight back in. But soon the regular housekeeping began in the cavity. The female poked her head out of the nest with her beak full of “leftovers” from dinner. This was the moment I had been waiting for. And so the shutter clicked quietly and the photos piled up on the card. After a few minutes three people loaded down with tripods appeared too. They were the German filmmakers. Their “task” was to capture the pygmy owl flying into the nest with prey. Everything was set up and we waited. But the female was still in the nest with her last catch, and our hope of getting one more flight shot faded with the fading light. In the end we decided to call it a day when it was almost dark. Still, I had achieved my goal for day one – a portrait from the cavity.

On the way back to the car I was given another “combat mission” – to get hold of some bait mice. At first the task didn’t seem difficult, but after I had run round practically every pet shop around Martin and Banská Bystrica, I discovered that mice in their natural colour apparently aren’t “made” any more, so I had to settle for a bunch of white and piebald rodents.

Day two began with our arrival at the site first thing in the morning. The filmmakers set up their “kit” and we slowly placed two mice on a broken tree a little below the nest. Before long the female called to us again in her unmistakable voice. We immediately started looking for her in the crowns of the surrounding trees. She was sitting nearby, staring intently at whatever was moving on the tree. It was our two bait mice. At first she just looked, probably not grasping that mice can be white too. While we were watching her like this, still out of reach of the cameras, the “bait” decided to abandon its post. One mouse voluntarily came back to me, so as a reward for this feat I returned it to the safety of its cage. The other chose the less safe option – strolling around in the undergrowth beneath the curious owl. As soon as the mouse was in the undergrowth, the female realised it was prey too (albeit oddly coloured). In an instant she locked on to that tiny something on the ground. She began flicking her tail excitedly and a few moments later dropped silently into a hunting dive. It was successful, and after a moment on the ground she rose back up into the crown of a beech – this time with her prey. Unfortunately the whole thing happened where we couldn’t photograph it. The pygmy owl began cutting up the mouse on a branch, so we turned our attention to the nest, where the hungry youngsters had started calling. But the female left the mouse “stashed” on the branch and went off for a flight. Evening was slowly drawing in and our model was away from the site. So we tried imitating the male’s call. She responded fairly quickly and came back again. Once more she didn’t come back empty-handed. This time her victim was an unwary tit. The female posed with her prey as well, and we called it a day.

Day three began with another early-morning arrival. The female greeted us straight away and curiously perched closer to us, so at last what we had all come for could begin – filming and photographing. We put out the bait mice again. This time the female already knew that even if it’s white, it’s still edible. So she showed off her hunting skills once more. And once again she was successful. This time the lads also managed to film the shot they had been longing for – the pygmy owl flying into the nest with prey – using a high-speed camera. Luckily she had cut up the mouse, so you couldn’t see that it was white. Once the youngsters had been fed, the female set off for the meadow again. We tried once more to lure the male by whistling. But even on the third day he didn’t show up. This was the German filmmakers’ last day at the site, so we were all glad they had got their footage. During the day I too managed to take some portraits, so I started thinking about something more action-packed again. I decided to try to photograph the pygmy owl in a hunting dive.

Day four, then, was all about experimenting. This time I went to the site alone – my colleague couldn’t come because of work commitments. For the photography I used the set-up I had already tested in my attempts at kingfisher action shots: a Canon 7D + Canon 24-70 L f/2.8, all controlled with a wireless remote. I put the mice in a deeper container and hid them under leaves. Of course, the mice had no intention of staying put in the container, and within a few minutes they were wandering all over the place. So I had to round them up and prepare an even deeper container. One mouse I couldn’t find, but the pygmy owl, sitting not far from me, was following it closely, and so there was another hunting performance – again with no chance of a photo. So the female was once again cutting up a mouse in a tree, and I too played at being a filmmaker and started gathering material for a short video documentary. While I was absorbed in filming, there was a crashing in the raspberry thicket on the opposite slope. At that moment I was frozen with fear. Presumably a bear was taking a break in the raspberries. I didn’t want to scare off the little owl, so I just kept watching quietly without moving a muscle. The “spectre” vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Pumped full of adrenaline, I nearly forgot to press the shutter at the very moment the little owl decided to inspect the contents of the mouse container. As soon as the female flew off, I dashed over to the camera… and there it was. The pygmy owl flying over the baited mice. The only flaw was that the sharpness wasn’t quite perfect, because a slow shutter speed of 1/1000 wasn’t enough. So I raised the ISO; the shutter speed was now 1/2500, which in theory should have been enough. But that day the female made no further attempt to hunt the mice in the container – she caught another mouse that had escaped from me unnoticed.

Day five

On the last day I went to the pygmy owl with my colleague, so I no longer suffered the paranoia I had after yesterday’s haunting in the raspberry thicket. This time, as soon as we had set up our gear, we whistled to see whether the female would answer, because the male hadn’t shown himself even once, and we suspected something had happened to him and the female had been left to raise the youngsters alone. Immediately after the whistle the female flew up closer to us. To my surprise I spotted a second little owl on a twig. I was delighted to see that the first youngster was out of the nest. I slowly crept closer for a “portrait session”. The pygmy owl isn’t particularly shy by nature – curious, if anything. The youngster just eyed me suspiciously and carried on examining everything around it. It didn’t mind a fly crawling all over it at all, which is how a humorous portrait with a fly on its forehead came about. As I had my rig set up for a hunting shot, I kept glancing over there too. But the female wasn’t very interested in prey – she had already caught a mouse – and was rather trying to get the little, pensive owlet to notice her. The youngster, however, really sat on its twig as if nailed to it and literally didn’t know which way was north. So the female kept moving around the nearby trees, encouraging the youngster to fly over to her. After about four hours the youngster finally decided to find out what its wings were actually for. It set off in the right direction, but then its wings stopped obeying, it slammed into the first tree and tumbled into the undergrowth. In speechless amazement I tried to process what I had just seen. The female didn’t just sit back and wait, and before long she flew up above the crash site, where the little castaway was calling impatiently. After about an hour of calling to the youngster, she flew down to it in the undergrowth with a piece of mouse as encouragement. A few minutes later she rose again to the lowest twig, where about an hour later her offspring followed her. By then there was no light left for photography, but we couldn’t leave until we were sure the young flier would be safe up in the tree.

That action-packed day brought my photography of this fascinating little owl to an end, as I had to travel to work. I would like to take this opportunity to thank my acquaintance who showed me this nest and thanks to whom I was able to add some interesting photos of our smallest owl to my portfolio. Priceless, too, are the experiences of watching the pygmy owl’s behaviour while nesting and as the young fledged, as well as the chance to see its perfect hunting technique several times. If it nests in the same cavity again next year, I plan to document the entire breeding cycle. So all that remains is to wish the youngsters all the best, and I hope to meet them again next year.