My name is Alan Lacy and I’m a wildlife filmmaker, cameraman, and producer. Adventure with me as I explore the amazing world of nature, and show you what it’s like filming the wild.
It’s about a 3 1/2 hour drive from where I live near Portland Oregon out to where the owls are on the Umatilla Army Chemical Weapons Depot. In this video, I’m headed out to Depot to meet up with our executive producer for our show, his name is Jim, to set up a couple blinds and get things ready so that we can start filming in the days to follow. It usually takes just a couple of days for the owls to get used to the blinds being there, so this is an important first step in order to get good natural behavior. This is also where world renowned owl expert, David H. Johnson has been studying them. David has been researching owls of all kinds for over 46 years, and he is the founder and director of the Global Owl Project. He has over 400 scientists, biologists, researchers, and volunteers in 66 countries working to gain a better understanding of the importance and significance of owls.
After meeting up with Jim, (he’s an incredible photographer, and a huge force for conservation by the way), we begin exploring a potential blind sights with David. We are looking for a site that has good lighting in either the morning or evening, or ideally both as the owls are most active at night. But they start to become active late in the evening and also goes all the way through into the early morning as well.
The unique thing about each burrow, is that it’s tailor made for burrowing owls. David designed an artificial burrow system which allows him to access the nest chamber to get accurate counts of eggs, and then the owlets once they hatch. He can then determine hatch dates and then when he needs to come back and then band the chicks.
Later, David, Jim, and I headed out and set up the wooden blinds, which will allow us to get close enough to film the owls without disturbing them. We used these blinds last year when we were out filming, so this time around it was super quick and easy to assemble them. It took us roughly 15 to 20 minutes to put each one all together.
Later in the day, we got to actually help David capture and band several owls. Over his career David has captured and banded thousands upon thousands of owls, and when it comes to burrowing owls in particular, he’s banded at minimum at least 6000 of them – pretty mind-boggling to be honest if you ask me. As we head out to the sites to capture some of the owls, I’m reminded about how fragile an ecosystem can be if we don’t take care of it. These owls once nearly disappeared from this region, but thanks to Davids hard efforts there are now a source population for burrowing owls all across the western United States. It goes to show how much one person can make a difference if they simply care, and then do something about it.
Over the years David has learned the best techniques to capture these owls is to use their instinctual behaviors. He has a near 100% success rate of capturing them. He first sets the trap near the burrow entrance, covering it up, and then decorating it as if an intruder has been there. He puts an MP3 player behind the trap that plays the call of a weak, two year old male, or pesky intruder as David calls him, which really drives the male nuts. Enough so that he goes in after the “intruder.”
After setting up a trap, we head to the next site and set up another. We put out 4 traps that night, and after about half hour’s time passed from setting up the first one, we were back at that site to check on the status of the trap. And bingo! We had ourselves a captured owl!
David takes the owls back to his truck so that he can do a full morphological work up, or in other words take detailed measurements from every unique feature of the owl. Part of the science and research he’s doing is determining the exact measurements of these owls which helps him in distinguishing the differences between other populations of burrowing owls across the Americas. His work here on the Depot is being replicated elsewhere in Aruba, Venezuela, Brazil, Florida, and many other places these little guys reside. This all helps us better understand these owls so that we can make better decisions about how to conserve them moving forward. They are endangered in many places, threatened in others, and mostly declining due to human conflict and misunderstanding of why they’re essential to the environment.
A few weeks later, and I’ve headed back to the Depot to begin filming the owls. By now they have acclimated to the blinds, and I can simply hop right in, set up the camera and tripod and get everything situated, and begin filming.
Each day filming consists of getting up at roughly 4:30am, getting coffee going, loading up the car with the camera equipment and gear, and then heading out the blind sites by about 4:50am or so, just as the sun is about to peak above the horizon. The goal is to be at the blind, with the camera set up and ready, with enough down time afterwards for the owls to settle back down after hearing me rummage around with the gear, and then be ready to roll cameras as soon as there’s enough light to film with.
And after a couple hours of waiting the little baby burrowing owls finally decided to come out. And it’s not just a couple… more and more kept coming out, until I was able to count seven youngsters! Now that’s a lot of mouths to feed! Soon the adult male, or dad landed on a perch nearby the burrow. He had caught a ten-lined june beetle, he then flew down and fed it the youngsters. Whoever makes it out to him first gets the prize!
Spending days upon days with these little guys, you truly start to fall in love with them, their antics, and their personalities. It takes a lot of practice to hone their skills at becoming adult burrowing owls. And it’s a true joy to observe them from the distance of the blind.
After a series of alarm calls from dad who was sensing danger nearby, the kids all scrambled back inside their burrow, their best defense against a potential predator. Which also meant that was the end of my shoot for the morning.
