Max the Great Horned Owl Hearing Hooting

Max lives at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and comes out with a handler every afternoon to be admired and photographed. He's had problems recently with aggressive native great horned owls attacking him, so he's on the lookout for incoming. Here, he's staring at a not-so-distant tree from whence the hooting is coming. I painted him with tiny isolated brush strokes on a white ground to illustrate the complexity of his plumage without actually trying to paint individual feathers.