Blue hour owl

Early sunshine this morning raised my hopes of a fine afternoon's owling, but by 10am the Tupperware lid had closed over the Vale of Evesham, and by the time I set off, just before noon, it was raining. I gritted my teeth and drove on, knowing that you can't properly judge the weather on the Cotswold scarp until you're at least part way up the Edge, but when I got to the Broadway Tower and realised I couldn't see across the valley that lies immediately beyond it, I almost gave up and went back home. But... I had a hunch. So I pressed on, and by the time I reached the Guitings things were looking a little better. By the time I reached the owl field the rain had all but stopped, though the verges and paths around it were unpleasantly claggy, and it was obvious that there had been a good bit of weather through earlier. The first Short-eared Owl I saw was sitting in a tree trying to dry its wet feathers, and a little further on I came across an even wetter Kestrel doing the same thing.

Shortly after I arrived and started to walk around the perimeter of the field there was a surge of owl activity, with five or six birds quartering the area. Unfortunately they were spending much of their time getting into arguments with each other, which tends to mean that they end up flying high, and too far away for good photos. Hunting passes were happening, but it always seemed that they were taking place where I wasn't, and my growing sense that all the other photographers I could see had chosen better positions than me was frustrating. I started to get a Bad Feeling about the whole enterprise.

Wandering up and down the wall, I bumped into a friend and we spent quarter of an hour chatting, while keeping an eye on an owl that was sitting on the cross wall and hoping (vainly) that it would decide to go and look for something to eat. A left just before 3pm, by which time the light was fading fast, so after giving the sedentary owl another few minutes (just in case), I decided to call it a day. But as I trudged back towards the road I saw that a group of guys about a hundred metres in front of me had stopped chatting and started photographing, and as I got closer I realised that while I'd been fixated on an owl that was probably busy digesting its last kill, this one had come out to play and was hunting far and wide across the top side of the field. The next forty minutes were hectic and deeply satisfying, and reminded me why so many of us just can't keep away from these birds. I stopped shooting when I couldn't sensibly lower my shutter speed or raise my ISO any further, but it was hard to stop watching, and if I hadn't had choir practice this evening I think I'd probably have stayed at the field until it was actually dark.