Sunk cost fallacy

Here is the story of my day at the owl field:

Weather: fine; mainly sunny
Temperature: 5°C, but feeling like 2°C due to windchill
Wind: North-easterly; 8mph, gusting to 16mph
Owls seen: 0
Birds photographed: 3
Photos taken: 66
Photos kept: 8
Time spent on site: 3 hours 15 minutes
Time spent wishing I'd gone to Farmoor instead: 2 hours 45 minutes
Reasons for persistence in the face of a mounting desire to be elsewhere: a combination of FOMO and the sunk cost fallacy.

For what it's worth (which isn't much), I think it's probably the combination of temperature and wind what done it for the owls today (not to mention for the owl photographers, of whom there must have been about forty standing around the perimeter of the field, freezing their equipment off). Owls, we all believe, don't find it easy to catch their prey when it's windy, because the susurration of the grass makes it harder for them to hear the field voles moving around. It must also be more costly in terms of energy expenditure for the owls to fly in windy conditions than when it's still. And when you add in the fact that today's wind was bitterly cold, I think it's pretty reasonable if their cost-benefit analysis came out in favour of staying hunkered down in their grassy tussocks, and leaving the field to the Kestrels and Corvids.

So here you have a Kestrel, taking the Mickey by eating a vole it had caught on one of the owl posts. Don't think I wasn't rooting for a Short-eared Owl talon to come over its shoulder and twitch the vole away, just so it knew what it felt like to be robbed. I also photographed a Raven, which I quite fancied posting just so I could title this blog Nevermore - but I gave R the choice, and he preferred the vole innards. Back in the day he used to be quite squeamish, I seem to remember - I wonder what happened?

If Short-eared Owls are your fancy, and you haven't already seen it, please check out yesterday's post.