During a trip to Varanger in June 2012 we were fortunate to find there had been a bumper breeding season for Hawk Owls in the area with excellent vole numbers. In the course of the week in the area we came across six pairs with young most of which were out of the nest already but one nest at higher elevations on the road up towards the Batsfjord tundra still had young in the nest. The main problem for photography was that the weather was a bit dismal most of the time with a lot of thick cloud and some rain while the adults were often liberally blood splattered around the facial disk! Below is a selection of images from the week.

All images were taken with a Canon 1D4 and a Canon 300 2.8 lens usually with a 1.4x converter.