Marty’s photo of the day #3681: This is the third picture I’m sharing of the immature saw-whet owl that stopped by for a visit over the weekend. In the actual sequence of shots, however, this was the first one I took. I wasn’t going to post this one, but my wife, Deb, walked around all weekend, smiling about how tiny and cute the owl looked from this angle. And she’s right. That first glimpse melted my heart too.

Tomorrow I’ll post a final picture of this little owl—a shot of her in a more natural setting, after she took off and landed in a tree.

For those who missed the posts for photos of the day #3679 and #3780, here’s a repeat of the saw-whet owl story:

I rarely choose my photo of the day until minutes before posting. That’s because sometimes one of my older photos will fit a current event, sometimes I really have to dig, and other times I haven’t shot the photo yet (that’s the beauty of living in the forest at the edge of the mountains, in Montana). Early this morning, I was moving my laptop computer out to my front porch office, when I had to chase a squirrel off of Deb’s chair. The little bastard had ripped open a seam and was absconding with a hunk of fiber fill. I went back inside to grab a cup of tea, and when I returned, I spotted what I thought was the squirrel, coming back up the steps for more. I was just about to yell at it when I realized it was an owl, not a squirrel.

At first I thought it was a baby that couldn’t fly or was injured. I called Deb out to the porch and she exclaimed, “It’s not a baby. It’s a pigmy owl!” Well, we were both wrong—sort of. As I shot picture after picture, Deb grabbed our bird identification book. What we were looking at was an immature saw-whet owl.

Fortunately, the owl was not injured—and she can fly! I shot more than fifty photos from various angles, including when she took off and flew to a low tree branch.

This has been quite the owl-year at our house, allowing me to capture up-close images of saw-whet, great gray, and great horned owls. You can expect more photos of this adorable saw-whet owl in the coming days.