Vole's eye view

Well, if it's a lucky vole, watching from the grass as the owl skims overhead. A less lucky vole would see that yellow glare swivel in its direction, followed probably by not much else.

Despite a glorious sunny morning down in the Vale, weather up on the scarp this afternoon didn't quite live up to expectations, and at least on the north side of the field the owls were tricksy, and mostly kept their distance. It was nice as ever to spend the Owling Hour with Hillyblips and Sheol, but I wasn't overly happy with my images. You might think that this owl flying actually over our heads would have provided easy pickings, but I was wearing so many layers of clothes it was a struggle to lift my arms high enough to get the camera pointing upwards, and most of the burst of seventy or so shots I took wound up in the trash. Tonight's second photo suffers from having more context than owl, but is interesting in showing how variable the light was - it looks to have been taken at the end of the afternoon, but was actually shot fifteen minutes earlier than my main image.

My best owl encounter of the day happened in deep dusk, back at the car on a virtually empty lane, when I stepped up to the wall to take a last look at the field as I was drinking my (very welcome) coffee. I think I actually squeaked as an owl flashed past me no more than twenty feet away, flying parallel with the wall and fast. Coffee down and camera up, I tried to get focus as it made a couple of swift circuits, but even the R5 can't perform magic when it can't see the thing you're asking it to photograph, so I gave up and just watched. After a few seconds the owl's circuit took it over the lane and off down the hare field towards the main road. At this point the camera found the pale edge of its tail and I got a couple of shots - but several stops underexposed even at ISO 12,800, they were clearly unusable. 

A few minutes after that and maybe half a mile away, as I drove back along the main road, a shortie crossed it in front of me - the first time I've ever had that happen, though I quite often find myself slowing to avoid Barn Owls. I've no way of knowing if this was the same owl I'd seen cross the lane or a different one, but there's been quite a lot of debate around the owl field recently about how a relatively small area of rough grassland can keep supporting at least six Short-eared Owls and some other predators as well, and the answer now seems to me to be that the shorties are actually hunting far more widely than we've tended to think.