Star K Ranch

Today I decided to take a trip to the Stark K Ranch, one of my favorite places in my home town, Aurora Colorado. Not many people know that Aurora has its own wilderness reserve, which is home to a herd of white-tailed deer, coyotes, and many species of birds. It also has extensive wetland areas.

This is what it looks like from the air.

The Ranch actually has a very nice nature center with restrooms and helpful naturalists. The nature center is the small building to the right, in the background.

Below is a panorama of one of the wetlands areas at the Star K Ranch, just about to bloom for the spring.

As I was walking along, I noticed something unusual in one of the trees--something that I had not noticed before on any of my trips to the Ranch. I attempted to take a picture of the tree as I saw it passing by, which I have inserted below. Let's see if you can spot it too.

There is a bird's nest in the center of the picture, and you can just barely make out the form of a great horned owl. I put on my telephoto lens to try to get a better shot, but the angle wasn't all too good. My attempt to capture the creature's image is below:

You can certainly make out the owl's ears, and part of her eyes. I moved over a little bit to try to get a better shot, and then enlarged the image as best I could. The result is a little pixelated, but this was my best attempt at a picture of the great horned owl today (below).

I went and spoke the the naturalist, and learned that this is a female great horned owl, and that she has a bunch of newly hatched chicks in the nest with her. The owl's mate was in another tree nearby. He hunts for the female and the chicks, but the female of the species is much larger than the male, so she protects the nest and the young. In fact, the naturalist told me that the male will sometimes take over sitting in the next so that the female can stretch her wings, but if a hawk comes by the male will call to the female so that she can return to protect their young.

The naturalist also told me that the owl's diet consists almost entirely of voles. Apparently the Stark K Ranch has a lot of voles around. This is what a Vole looks like:

After taking a while to soak in the owl, I spotted a little herd of deer (below).

Nice Rack!