Burrowing owls

[Grumpy Old Guy]

19. Actually, they are pretty chill.

You can tell by the photos that they never took their eyes off us, but in many of these photos we were only about fifty yards away. We shot most of them from across a road or drainage ditch. They have a particular warning call that they make to alert each other and their offspring to get back in the burrow.

The Sonny Bono Wildlife Refuge is in Imperial County, California, along the southern edge of the Salton Sea. It's in a heavy agricultural area that is criss-crossed by open irrigation ditches. All of these birds were burrowing alongside those ditches.