Tawny Owl Diary 2020

This documentary film follows the development of a tawny owl chick from hatching until he is about 3 months old.
Just after the imposition of the Covid-19 lockdown, I discovered a Tawny Owl’s nest in my garden. This nest was not in a hollow tree; it was in an abandoned Grey Squirrel drey. Although this nest was 40 feet up the tree, it was visible from within the garden from various different angles. I decided to chronicle the early life and development of a Tawny Owl chick, and set up a camera and telephoto lens to record activity within the nest. Since tawny owls are a nocturnal species, I had to determine the best way to film the activity at night. I tried an infra-red capable camera, but the quality was just not good enough, and the telephoto was not powerful enough to obtain good footage. Tawny Owls have excellent night vision, but they cannot see red light very well. I purchased two red LED floodlights, and also a red wildlife LED torch. The lights were set up to illuminate the nest and switched on before night time so as to minimise disturbance. The owls were filmed every night, and it was apparent that they were not disturbed too much, becoming accustomed to my regular presence near the nest. The adults would come and go to the nest, flying right over my head to bring food to the chicks, even though I was not using any type of concealment.
When the surviving young owlet vacated the nest and took up residence in the neighbouring woodland, its regular call enabled me to follow its movements and carry on filming up until it was almost 3 months old. Because the young owlet was constantly on the move, I had to use the wildlife torch fitted to the top of the camera. Unfortunately, this created an unavoidable “red eye” effect. I lost track of the owlet on 15th July. Young owls have to leave their parents’ territory during late July/early August and fend for themselves and find an area where there are no resident pairs of tawny owls. Many young owls will starve during this hazardous period.
The cameras I used were a Sony A7S2, which has good low light capability, and a Sony A6400 as a secondary camera. Whilst filming with red light at night, I used a black and white picture profile. The lens used for the close up shots was a Sony FE 4.5 – 5.6/100 – 400 GM OSS with a 1.4X tele-converter. Ambient sounds were recorded using a Roland R-26 Portable 6 track recorder with an additional AT8024 mic set to “shotgun” mode, and mixed with Logic Pro X. Editing was done in Final Cut Pro and transitions made in Photoshop and Apple Motion. Lightwave was used for the “Windmill Video Films” sequence and the Diary opening and closing sequence. The Debussy pieces were midi files, processed with Logic Pro X.