Wildlife Callers

Photographing the Great Horned Owl – By Michael J. Burm

Add a new dimension to your wild animal photography—electronic wildlife callers aren’t just for hunting!

Wildlife Callers.Com is fortunate to have Mike J. Burm as a guest blogger on our site, he is a gifted wildlife photographer who uses digital calling technology to attract his photo ops. He has been kind enough to contribute his insights on how to photograph wildlife and how he uses his digital caller to help him get his spectactular photographs. The following entry is Mike’s first contribution to our blog, we hope to offer many more in the future, please visit Mike’s photo gallery at the link below.

If you enjoy wildlife and taking photos of animals like I do, you know it’s challenging to find the time and money to get out and do it. Even when I do, getting close enough to capture high quality wildlife images doesn’t always happen. In looking for opportunities to get more time in the field and get more consistent calling results I’m using a Wildlife Technologies electronic wildlife and predator caller to call Great Horned Owls. I teamed up with a friend who shares my passion for wildlife photography, we’ve learned how to call owls, and we’re getting some outstanding photos of them. We’re doing it right here in the greater Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area—just minutes from home.

We’d seen, heard, or been told about owls here in town over the years and decided to try our hand at getting some photos. Rather than just hoping to find them we tried wildlife calling to bring the owls to us. The Wildlife Technologies unit allows us to call owls with actual recorded owl vocalizations.

On a golf course that we’d heard owls on and near over the years, we set up just after dark as near to one of the holes as we could get and began to call. After about fifteen minutes we heard an owl respond and had a mature Great Horned Owl perched on a tree nearby. We had just discovered that owls readily respond to calling—especially when they hear another owl in the area.

We find that, once called, owls will generally stay around from a few minutes to about a half hour once they respond. Getting good quality photos at night requires some reasonably powerful flashlights to illuminate the owl well enough to focus on the bird and camera flash powerful enough to get good light at a fair distance, such as a treetop. You’ll need a friend to hold the flashlight on the owl while you attempt to take the photo.

One of our best calling efforts resulted in five Great Horned Owls coming to the call–what a thrill! With five owls hooting and flying all around us, we got so excited that we could hardly keep our minds on getting photos. And, with only one flashlight support person it taxed our ability to work together and get good photos.

We’re now trying to predict where the owls will land and set up to get the best photos including photos of them in flight. Our challenge is not so much getting the owls to come in rather it is getting the camera gear to focus in the low light. We’re experimenting with the use of a radio controlled flash to see if we can improve image quality.

Best regards and we’ll keep you posted on the results.

Michael J. Burm
http://mjbphoto.smugmug.com