Unexpected owl

It was supposed to be at least partly sunny up at the owl field this afternoon, but as you can see, it wasn't. It was also supposed to be reasonably warm, and it wasn't that either. And as for owls... well, let's just say that when the first one of the day is a Barn Owl it doesn't bode well for your chances of a shortie bonanza, and in this at least, today's runes didn't lie.

I'd arrived at about 1.15pm and parked on the lane, then walked down to the crossroads chatting with a friend, before wandering on up the road towards the copse by myself. En route I photographed a bird on a stick kestrel in a tree, and snagged a few shots of a mini-murmuration of starlings, which took off from the sheep field on the other side of the road and swirled down past the farm before disappearing. Tonight's second image is a shot of the starlings, and I'm not entirely sure I don't like it better than the main photo - but when you go to the owl field after owls, and manage to get an owl... it's hard not to post the owl you got.

When I reached the north wall, I positioned myself by the stile half way along it so that I could watch both halves of the field, and waited. And waited, and then waited some more. Every now and then someone would walk past, and we'd ask each other the inevitable question, but none of them had seen anything either. Then I glanced back towards the coppice and realised that the distant figure with the big lens was Hillyblips, so I wandered back and and joined her. A while later she thought she spotted wings over the far field, and as I had the more portable gear I walked back to the stile to take a look, and confirmed that there was one Short-eared Owl up on the far side, but very distant and heading away. It certainly didn't look promising, and I was beginning to make my way back to HB when something suddenly appeared out of the gloom and flew towards me, and by reflex reaction I lifted the camera and began shooting. I'd rattled off quite a few frames before I even realised it was a Barn Owl. 

This was at about 3.15, and it was a full hour later, and I was teetering on the verge of calling it a day, when HB and I got our one and only Short-eared Owl of the afternoon. This turned out to be the one we call Quarry Owl, and it made the flight we've come to expect - along the roadside wall, over the north wall, past the coppice and round into the quarry - with just a brief set-down and lift-off, which HB managed to capture and I didn't, in the top corner of the field. By this time the light was an hour worse than it had been when I shot the Barn Owl, and because the lack of action over the course of the afternoon had left me dozy I was still on the settings I'd dialled in for the starlings nearly three hours earlier: in other words, my aperture was too narrow and my shutter speed too high, so inevitably the ISO went through the roof, and all my shots of Quarry Owl look as though they were taken during a hail storm. I may keep the least worst one or two, just in case he turns out to be the last shortie of the season, but I certainly won't be entering them in any competitions.