Distant Skies

This wee fellow is fond of the uppermost reaches of the cage. It's a big cage, allowing compassionate keepers to provide perching spots with truly wretched angles of view. The enclosure in beside a busy walkway out of the Americas pavilion, and the photographer has to stand there and sort of limbo around a narrow angle that will view through the mesh and compose with the whole owl, with—one hopes—as little of the blazing bright green plastic roof as one can get. (Though in the lack of the blazing, etc. roof aforesaid, there isn't enough light to get a picture of the creature whatsoever. Everything is tradeoffs.)
Though this profile doesn't show it, this particular saw whet owl is lacking its other eye, and I suspect does much, much better in the zoo than it would ever do in the wild. So the photo + title has more pathos to it (I hope!) than the well-fed and typically snoozing bird might properly engender.