Haring around

"You'd better go out," said R, who's preparing to do some gigs with one of his oldest friends (for the first time in twenty five years), and preferred not to have me in the house during their rehearsal this lunchtime. I didn't take it amiss, because I hate it when I know that he's having to listen to me practising my choir music, and generally suggest that he shuts himself in his study and plays something loud while I squawk along to my rehearsal CDs. So I took myself off just as L was arriving, waving cheerily at him as our cars passed, and went to the nearest place where I thought I'd get a photo, which was Hillers.

To begin with there appeared to be more people I knew in the hide (one of them Hillyblips) than there were birds out in the clearing, but in the end I did manage to bank a few photos of Siskins and Lesser Redpolls. Eventually, about fifteen minutes after HB and my mate M both left, the elusive Brambling appeared, and once I'd banked that as well I decided that I had enough shots of baited birds, and it was time to head to the scarp.

Probably the less said about my two hours on the scarp, the better - it's not, after all, the Cotswolds' fault that I made the rookie error of not checking the wind speed before venturing up there. However, it's fair to say that I was Not Happy, when I parked the car on the lane and discovered that I could barely force the door open in the teeth of the howling gale that was blowing through. After extricating myself from the car I went walking, simply because it was too cold to stand in one place rather than out of an expectation of finding any wildlife, but in the event all my trudging about along the field edges turned up a flock of Red-legged Partridges and several Brown Hares. 

I love Brown Hares, and I'm always hugely impressed when people post close-up portraits of them, but I don't seem to see them very often, and when I do they're usually just specks on the horizon. I think the only other one I've posted here was my extra from the day of the RPS Salisbury Plain Great Bustard expedition. So I'm pleased to have caught a run of images of this individual, even though it was quite a way away and I've had to crop them pretty heavily. Many of them also suffered photo-bombing by the Red-legged Partridges, which were far more worried about me than the apparently oblivious Brown Hare, and kept rushing up to it as if for protection against the hideous predator. Still, if I were a partridge I think I might also get a bit hysterical about people pointing long objects towards me. 

Both tonight's shots were chosen by R. The second one looks at first glance to be the Hare bounding along at full stretch, but in fact just shows it stretching, before settling down in a furry heap to digest its dinner..