Too much lens

I had to go to Stratford this morning, to collect a book I'd ordered for the Boy Wonder. I hadn't asked for rain, or expected it given that the forecast merely threatened cloud, but as I arrived it began to spit, and by the time I'd walked along the south bank of the river to the Old Tramway Bridge it was raining quite hard. There were no Goosanders around, and last weekend's Tufted Ducks have moved on, but the Black-headed Gull count is rising steadily as birds disperse from their summer breeding territories into winter feeding grounds, and as I had no expectation of finding anything better, I stood for a while in the wet by the Bancroft Basin, taking photos of them in flight.

After collecting Burglar Bill from the bookshop I squelched up to BTP for coffee, hoping that I could sit out the rain. This didn't happen, but after a while I was joined by The Artist Formerly Known As R, who'd been at Charlecote for a meet-up with a group of former colleagues (there's probably a collective noun for a flock of process improvement consultants, but I can't immediately think what it might be), which had been rained off at half time.

Given the weather it was only bloody-mindedness that took me the long way back to the car, along the north bank of the river and through Holy Trinity church yard. For once though my common sense deficit paid off, by giving me a ridiculously close encounter with this Grey Squirrel. It had been rummaging at the base of a chest tomb, in deep shade underneath the trees, when it suddenly realised there was a human approaching and dashed round to the far side of the monument to hide. I cautiously followed, but as soon as our eyes met it darted round the tomb again, before making a break for it and jumping onto the nearest tree trunk. It then froze, and I slowly raised the camera and shot. Realising that I was too close for 500mm of lens, and not wanting to lose focus by fiddling with the zoom, I started to back slowly away, but I'd only taken a couple of steps when the squirrel decided it was now safe to move, and shot up the tree out of sight. 

I'd like to express my heartfelt thanks here to the R5, for finding and holding the squirrel's eye in near-darkness; and to the new Denoise facility in Lightroom, for rapidly cleaning up a set of horribly noisy files and making them presentable.