Description
This owl was sitting on a branch about five feet off the trail, at eye level, and he did not move. With a 400mm lens that gets you a portrait like this one: the whole face filling the frame, both dark eyes lit gold from the side, the pale bill, every feather of the facial disc resolved. He was not frightened of me in the slightest. If anything, the look reads as a challenge — I dare you to pass.
Which is not entirely a joke. Barred owls are known to swoop at people who walk too close to a nest — there are well-documented cases of joggers losing hats and picking up scratches on the scalp. It has never happened to me, and this bird made no move at all. But the confidence in that stare is real, and it is why he ended up cast as the Bridgekeeper on my Nature Is Funny page, demanding to know the airspeed of an unladen swallow.
A word about “invasive”
Barred owls carry a label out here. They spread west across the continent during the last century and now overlap with the northern spotted owl, which they outcompete in old-growth forest — bigger, bolder, and far less fussy about what they eat. That conflict is real, it is serious in the deep forest, and it has led to removal programs.
I would offer a distinction, though. Nutria were shipped here on purpose for the fur trade and turned loose. Carp were stocked. The barred owl arrived on its own wings, following habitat that our own land-use changes helped create, doing exactly what a species does when a door opens. That is not the same category of thing, whatever word gets applied to it.
And at Oaks Bottom, in the middle of a city, the calculation looks different again. There is no old-growth spotted owl territory here to lose. Barred owls are uncommon in the refuge — seeing one at all is an event. Meanwhile the nutria are undeniably charming, the carp feed the eagles, and the sea lions came up the Willamette because they were following fish, which is the only plan a sea lion has ever had.
Nearly everything alive invaded somewhere at some point, humans very much included. It is worth holding the label a little loosely, and looking hard at the animal in front of you first.
This is a high-resolution digital download of the photograph, made in Portland, Oregon — yours to print for your home or office, set as a wallpaper, or simply keep. The near-square frame and the scale of the face make this the one I would hang large.
What you’ll receive: a high-resolution JPEG, approximately 4176 × 4096 pixels — very nearly square, sharp enough to print at full photo quality up to about 13.5 inches on a side at 300 DPI, and considerably larger for wall display. Delivered as an instant download the moment your order is complete.
License: Personal use only. Print it for your own home, use it as a wallpaper or screen background, enjoy it yourself. Not licensed for commercial use, resale, redistribution, or AI training. © Jonathan Swanson / JonSwan Productions. All rights reserved.