It’s gone time that I started taking my own advice.
The weather today was almost Mediterranean compared with yesterday, the wind having swung round into the west and decreased significantly, so as long as you were standing in sun you could almost kid yourself that it was warmer than 8°C. This made it a promising owling day, I decided. But all the way up into the high Cotswolds I was nagged by doubts, remembering what I wrote myself three days ago: on the way into midwinter, the owls come out when they’re hungry, and that’s not necessarily going to be when the light is at its best for photography.
When I arrived at 12.30pm there were half a dozen cars already parked along the lane, but most of their owners were sitting in them, looking bored. My birding friend M and his wife P were standing at the wall, and had been since 7.30am, they told me – five hours during which they’d seen numerous small passerines, but not a hint of an owl. A couple of hours later one shortie went up, and then ten seconds later went back down again. An hour after that M and P left, and I walked around to the north-east corner of the field to restore my circulation and get a new perspective on the situation. It wasn’t any better than the old perspective, so after standing and gazing at the field for a while I trudged back round to the lane.
In the meanwhile HB had arrived, and joined what was now a bit of a scrum along the wall. I was feeling bitter and twisted by this stage, and was beginning to shiver as the light level and temperature both plunged, so I stomped off to the car for an energy bar and some coffee, promising myself that as soon as I’d had them I would leave. Which was the point, inevitably, at which the owls came out to play – first a Barn Owl, and then a single Short-ear, dancing around each other in the gathering gloom.
I’ve added a couple of photos of the shortie, purely to prove that I caught it. This is a poor reason, but then, they’re poor photos, taken at 1/640 second and ISO 12,800 – but in their favour, they are the best of the eight frames I managed in this fly-past sequence. The Pheasant in the main image was one of several dozen that were feeding the field on the south side of the lane as I came back from my walk, and the only one that didn’t do an immediate Road-runner impersonation the second I hove into view. A few minutes after sunset they flew en masse across the lane (and the heads of the few remaining togs along the wall) to reach their roost in the owl field. It’s a sight that would have been worth capturing, if anyone had been using an f/2.8 lens.
