this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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This adorable forehead belongs to a Boreal Owl, also known as Tengmalm's Owl.

Description from All About Birds

In the dark of the night, the small Boreal Owl comes alive in the spruce and fir forests of northern North America and Europe. This bright-eyed, square faced owl sits and waits on a perch for small mammals and birds before gliding down talons first to grab it. From late winter through spring, its quick, hollow hooting sounds across the dark forest as the male calls for a mate. They spend the year in boreal forests, occasionally making their way farther south in years of prey scarcity.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago

The rest of the owl:

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Alright I'm officially comfortable with being stalked now as long as that owl is doing it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I'd stalk it right back! It's too cute! 🥰

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can’t fool me… That’s a crocodile!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Just as vicious, but much cuter and fluffy!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

🎵🎶There's an owl in a hole in the log on the floor of the forest over by me 🎶🎵

(Reference for anyone who doesn't know lol: https://youtu.be/uZztvSt4Cp0?feature=shared)

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

unnecessary blur on that there picture...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I ran Pixel's Unblur on it 4 times and cropped out the rest for you. 😉

It does seem a little excessive, but that's artistic license I suppose. It was supposedly a real photographer that took the photo, but this pic has been around the Internet for a while, and I couldn't confirm the original source.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

lol, thanks... that looks a lot better

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

I accommodate you all when I can! 😆

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

yeah, duh, everyone has that effect on their camera

in this case, in was unnecessarily added in

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Unless it was completely faked, the photographer likely has no choice for this. Lowering the aperture to get a wider depth of field wou reduce the amount of light significantly to either introduce motion blur (if not on a tripod) or significant noise. Also, this sort of angle on a telephoto lens would be very difficult to not blur out

Unless it is faked in, it's difficult to tell though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the insight. I'm not a photographer, so I try hard to weed out fake pics, I'm just interested in sharing real owls.

I get a lot of stories from animal rescues off their Facebook feeds, so I get recommended all these "owl photos" where most are very unlikely to be real, but some like this are plausible, but I try to trace them back to an actual person. This was listed by a million reposts as being by EE Photography, which I couldn't find anywhere.

The pic is simple enough, and isn't showing anything unrealistic, so I figured what the heck. It's a fun pic I think, so this one made the cut.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

When I say faked I more specifically mean the depth of field being faked which I would be very surprised if it was

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Ooo I gotcha now. I do appreciate the insight though, my photography knowledge is very limited, so even though I don't totally understand, it's more than I knew before!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Pretty much, if I was shooting this with my D850 and 200-500mm at 500mm and f/7.2 and the owl was 20ft away the total depth of field would be 2.3 inches 5.8cm. That's half that in front of the plane of focus and half behind. That's about as shallow as I would want to go and so looking at that image I think it's shot at maybe 300mm