once in a lifetime

i have been crawling through my STILL archive the last few days. i have a publisher interested in a STILL book, and i am trying to wrap my head around what that might look like (it’s very early in the process, so doin’t get too excited yet). anyway, in the act of crawling through my archive i can across this splendid creature. it is a juvenile great horned owl. what the what? you heard right, a juvenile great horned owl.  it’s so magnificent i can hardly take it in at one sitting. i photographed it in year two or three of STILL blog. i don’t even know if i posted it, because i was so unsure of how you all would react to dead animals in your feed. anyway, steve and i were picking our son, joseph, up at summer camp in northern minnesota. and very early in the morning, just after sun up, we came across this owl, dead on the side on the road. it was clearly roadkill. it probably died just before dawn. he wasn’t bloody. and there were feathers everywhere. it was the feathers we noticed first, i happened to have my white tag-board and camera with me because northern minnesota is great for STILL scouting. so, we pulled over and i made a few furtive snap shots. i was still very uncomfortable with shooting dead animals back then. i don’t know why. it was as if i was doing something illegal. i have since learned that it is not illegal to make a photo of a dead animal, even if it protected. as long as you leave it where you found it. in any case, this photo has been buried in my archive for years. i don’t suspect i will ever again come across a road-killed juvenile great horned owl. i hope you can overcome the gruesome factor here, and  find it as fascinating and magnificent as i do.

p.s. zoom in and look at its feet. spectacular.

juvenile great horned owl