Burrowing owls

Ty for sharing!

I especially really like the fifth image down. Looks to be a crop from the shot above. Terrific detail, owl so well-balanced on one leg, concentrating. Such beautiful animals!! Great Gallery!!!

You are correct, that is a closer crop. I have about twelve more images in that particular sequence. I think it was a junebug.

What delightful creatures. Thanks for sharing them.

They are magnificent creatures. Thank you for sharing your photos of their antics!

Did you use a teleconverter to assist in taking these photos?

Canon EOS R5, 45 mp
Sigma 150-600mm zoom (I have a Canon RF 100-500mm on backorder)
Most of the images were manual exposure, 1/4000th, f/8, ISO 800 - 1200.

I don't have a teleconverter. Instead, I use Topaz SharpenAI as a plug-in for Photoshop. I do most of my processing with Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw and Topaz plug-ins.

Topaz SharpenAI sharpens images and reduce noise. It's not perfect, but it works great about 90% of the time. It enables me to do some extreme cropping. You can see that I really push the limits of cropping, especially on the birds in flight.

You can use Topaz as a plug-in or a stand alone program. They have a 30 day free trial, lifetime putchase and they upgrade it constantly. The only downsides are that it's incredibly slow and it's terrible for portraits.

nice!

branch is trimmed - were they confined?

Nope, they're wild. This place is really popular with birders and bird photograpgers. I noticed that there were four of five of these phony perches set up.

I've been told that the Audubon Society visits regularly to make sure that people keep their distance.

I was trying to see if there was a net structure in the background but it mostly looked open. I was curious if there was, how it was constructed.
yeah maybe one trimmed branch in a path or roadway, but in general that many cuts is a manufactured perch.

I follow a lot of bird photographers on YouTube, and many of them do it. They'll carry an extra tripod with a phony tree limb attached into the woods. Some will even bait it with bird seed. Then they'll set up their cameras a reasonable distance away and wait for their shot.

my sister is thinking about getting into birding. I knew and warned her some people are nutty and super competitive, that it isn't all just strolling through nature and seeing things randomly. but clearly I didn't have a clue.

They'll put bugs in the frig to slow them down or stick them on a pin