The eyes have it

Some days you're the owl, and some days you're the owl that just had its vole filched by a marauding kestrel.

After yesterday's session I came home feeling like The Great Owl Photographer. Today... not so much. The owls were behaving very differently: though I was standing in almost the same place as yesterday, today they mainly kept their distance ("You should have been here at one o'clock!" said Andy Harris. "They were going up and down right in front of here!"), and quite often they were flying high, which rarely makes for good photos. I guess they'd eaten well earlier, and weren't especially hungry. So there was a lot of standing around staring at nothing, and then desperately trying to get cold hands and numb brain rapidly into gear when something did take off.

Luckily I managed it when this lovely pale creature appeared from the rough a short distance east of me, and this fly-past towards the late afternoon sun got me the best half-dozen images of my day. I asked R which of them I should post; by a talon the one I've put on Facebook was his favourite, but in the end I've plumped for this one because you can see more of the face - once again, it's the eyes that really grab me. Please do take a look at it full-screen, if you have the time.

Because of the shape of the dark marking around the left eye and under the right wing (visible in my Facebook post), I'm reasonably sure that this is the same owl posted by Hillyblips, who was standing about twenty feet to my right. It may even be from the same fly-past; if so I like her darker processing, which I think works very well.