Golden Eyes . . . & Feathers - Andaman Boobook

South Andaman

I saw my first Andaman Boobook (Hawk Owl) within 10 minutes of finishing photographing my first Walden’s Scops Owl. It was at a close location and it was a very different owl indeed although very similar in size. Now, owls are silent fliers so this guy snuck up behind us and was happily watching us flash lights on the trees opposite him for a bit, probably thinking to himself how silly the three of us looked walking around frantically with flashlights being all serious and bothered about his mate's call coming from the other side. By the time we got smart and I finally had him on focus, I was in for a delight.

Those golden feathers under wonderful gold and black owl eyes were staring at me straight (Pic : 1). I was at the same settings as earlier ie, 10K iso & 1/50 shutter. I didn’t want to, but had to do a review of the photos to be sure that I was getting this guy’s brilliant feathers right. In hindsight though, I should’ve walked around and taken more photos of him looking at me if he maintained his gaze. I also learnt soon that these guys are masters of the famous owl head turn that’s been shown so many times on TV. As in, they do it a lot. One second, he’s looking to his left and the next his head’s gone 200 degrees around. Man, I was so tempted to shift to video but not knowing when it’d happen was a risk I wasn’t willing to take given that I didn’t know if I’d see another of their kind ever and video isn’t my thing usually. I actually got lucky and caught a second guy of their kind a couple of nights later. (Pics 6-12) Both of these guys didn’t even care that we were flashing lights towards them on interval and just went about their business of staring around with the occasional head turn thrown in. Best approach with them, I learnt was to hold the shutter down as soon as there was any head movement to catch the eyes in case I hadn’t got him looking where I wanted in relation to the frame I was making. It’s something I usually detest for the added work of cleaning images off the card later but these guys just didn’t care enough for me to give me a stare frequently. I think I could only manage a couple of shots with the second guy looking towards me despite trying for a long time and never really at me. I guess he had me in his field of vision and I really wasn’t of any interest to him.

The Andaman Boobook is related to the Brown Boobook which is seen all around India and S.E. Asia. They’re smaller than their Brown cousins and sport the same hawk like shape, long tail and lack of a facial disk. Now, Boobooks face the problem of being mobbed by small birds while roosting in a tree. Owls in general aren’t very good friends to other birds and it doesn’t help our friend much that his kind are small and they take the brunt of it. They usually counter this by building multiple nests in different locations in case they have to give the mob the slip and need someplace to chill.

The contrast between the Walden’s Scops Owl and the Andaman Boobook despite them being of similar size really peaked my interest in owls thanks to this trip to Andaman. They’re such beautiful creatures of the night and that beauty honestly can only truly be seen at night. I’m reminded of my post about Tit Birds where I mentioned that story of the gentleman who travelled around the world to find an owl that he finally got to see a few hundred kms from home. I understand Him much better now. They’re fantastic creatures tied to legend and mythology. But I’ll get to that in a different post I think. I’ve still got lots of unprocessed owl photographs to get through first to make a general post.