Dusky

The Met Office promised late sunshine up on the Cotswold scarp, but it never materialised, and the light was pretty poor throughout the session. Several of the usual suspects were circling the owl field, including Sheol and Hillyblips, and it was nice to see Incredibish joining the Gloucestershire Owl-fanciers Club as well.

My second photo is the best of today's flight shots, and was taken within moments of me arriving - seeing several lenses already pointing at the field as I was parking, I grabbed the camera and rushed to the nearest piece of wall, just in time to get the fly-past. The main image, in contrast, was the final shot of the day. Late in the session, while walking up the road in a vain effort to reach the north wall before the light expired, I'd seen two owls having a brief disagreement in the pasture on the east side of it, one of whom stayed there while the other turned back into the owl field. A few minutes later,  just as I was thinking of calling it a day, a birder came past me, scanning the sheep field with binoculars. "I think there is an owl over there," I said, and he smiled and said "Yes there is - it's sitting on the wall." We both managed to get reasonably close before the bird decided we were taking liberties and moved further away along the wall, and I like the setting of this portrait, with the owl set off by the blue of the distant hills.

I have been meaning, and forgetting until now, to post a couple of interesting articles about Short-eared Owls. The first one comes from the BTO, and describes some new research into the species' extraordinary lifestyle; and the second, which was brought to my attention by LesTension, is from American Bird Conservancy and gives some fascinating facts about owl eyesight.