A tale of two hours

After being stuck in the house for most of the past three days I was raging to be out and about, so when we opened the curtains on sunshine this morning my first words to R were "Owl day!" "Go," he said. "If the forecast is right, it may be the last chance you get for a while."

Despite none of them having an owl in it, I'm posting three photos tonight, because they show quite neatly what can happen up in the high Cotswolds over the course of just a couple of hours. I arrived at 11am in glorious sunshine, though it was a little hazy and I knew it was predicted to become cloudy in the afternoon. Some people who were already there told me that they'd just walked the entire perimeter of the field without seeing an owl, but there were plenty of other birds out and about, so I walked up and down the lane for a while to see what I could find. There were numerous winter thrushes feeding in the trees at the sides of the road, but I couldn't get close to any of them so I was grateful to this little Stonechat for posing so nicely on an old umbellifer stalk.

By the time I'd been there for half an hour the mist was building, and it became obvious that by "cloudy" the weather forecast meant that the cloud was going to take a little rest from being up in the sky by dropping down and sitting on the scarp instead. It was still bright, but capturing small birds as far away as the Stonechat had been wasn't possible any longer. The Goldfinch was close to the wall - which is what's obscuring the bottom of the image - but if it had been much further out I'd have struggled to get focus on it.

By noon I was sitting in my car drinking coffee and going through my emails, as the mist thickened into fog, the sun disappeared, and the visibility range shortened with every passing minute. At 1pm someone banged on my car window to let me know there was an owl up, but by the time I'd grabbed the camera and scrambled to the wall it was too distant and obscured for my autofocus to latch onto. A few minutes later I realised that there was a Roe buck about thirty metres away, and this time the camera managed to find enough contrast to focus; but the owl had been more like a hundred metres out and flying at the horizon line, so it's really no wonder I missed it. 

Shortly after this I decided to exercise some common sense, and went home. As I dropped down from the top of the scarp the fog thinned to mist, which persisted for most of my journey but finally dispersed as I descended the Edge via Saintbury Hill. Even after all the meteorological weirdness of the past week, it still felt strange to emerge into a sunny Vale of Evesham afternoon.