From Phil Stone
First in 2 years for me!
Beautiful owl! Absolutely showing off for the camera lol
There’s some really great snowy pics coming through lately. I’ve got a free more ready to go, and they keep coming in.
You guys are missing all the Facebook drama around them. It seems like many of the more amateur or non-photographer people keep getting in the contributors’business about harassing the owls , likely due to these pics being so good they assume the camera folk are getting close enough to disturb them.
As we’ve seen over some of the recent posts showing the extreme zoom capability these days, the owls probably are aware there’s people there, but they are not so close as to really disturb them.
It sounds like these arguments occur every year during snowy season. It’s good people are concerned for the safety of the owls, but at the same time, there should also be consideration of the respect they majority of the photographers are giving the animals while they still get the photos.
It never seems to matter how passionate or knowledgeable you are on something, there’s always someone on the internet ready to jump down your throat from the top of the bathtub-curve about it lol
Very true! I do my best to remind myself of that here. I’m no expert on anything, I just enjoy a lot of reading and looking at pictures and finding answers to questions that come up. Just because I’ve done more reading than the average person on owls, I still only know what I’ve read and have tried to verify as factual to the best of my abilities. Something things will come up and my brain will want to fill in the gaps of the knowledge I can find, and I just have to tell it to shut the heck up. I don’t ever want to give you guys info I can’t at least site a few sources for.
But each of us can only know what we “know” as there are so many gaps in everyone’s personal knowledge. There’s nothing wrong with that, as it’s impossible to know everything, but we do need to be mindful of our blind spots and not just assume we know what is there. That should be looked at as a new avenue to explore, not a spot to just throw a random guess and call it a day.
Your attitude is why this is such a great community. Thank you for all you share with us.
You guys are all so nice! ☺️
It wouldn’t work without all of you being such a great audience! I’m very thankful we all get to have fun together.
