Owlscapes (2023)
As the pandemic got underway in early 2020 I photographed owls in a nearby woods, Great Horned Owls, a mother and father, and two chicks. My two daughters, one a year out of college, the other just about to graduate, moved back in until we could figure out what was going on with COVID and all that spring and summer we would walk down the road from our house, along the old mountain road, to the woods with the owls. We watched the chicks grow, watched them learn to fly, watched their feathers turn brown, transforming into adult-looking birds.
The photographs I made then were fun photographs, images to share with friends and family and to share with neighbors in our small town who would sometimes gather on the abandoned road near the nest to watch the chicks. Once the chicks could fly well enough they left the nest taking as their home another part of the woods, this part less accessible to humans, on the edge of Montara Mountain.
The next year we did not see any owl chicks but the year after that we found them in April, already flying short distances. COVID was fading, and people were getting back to normal. My wife and one daughter—the other daughter had moved off to grad school the year before—would walk out almost every day to look for the owls. I made serious photographs this time.
I consider the compositions of the images a sort of cooperative effort, with the owls themselves taking part, despite being fully unaware of their role. I placed the owl in the center of the image and let the composition form itself, the owl’s presence creating a kind of pictorial structure.
The colors of these images thrill me every time I look at them. I adjusted the colors in a fanciful attempt to recreate something of how the world must look to the owls which can see farther into the UV spectrum than human eyes. Scientifically accurate or not, the odd palette speaks to me on some deeper level. I wish all of my photos could look like these.
Photography went on five, six, sometimes seven days a week and as the spring turned into summer I began to worry that I would have to leave the woods too soon. We expected the chicks to fly away from the area sometime in late summer to begin their lives separate from their parents but I needed to drive my second daughter to Texas in late August for her to start her PhD program. As it happened, the chicks, now barely distinguishable from the parents, vanished from the area two days before our departure.
You can read more about how this project began here in a March 2023 blog post and you can read about my 2020 images here, the posts effectively bookmarking the pandemic itself.
