Sunday 24 January 2010

Owl prowling again

What an amazing week, this first bird "blew my socks off" having it perched in front of me for a while I made a little squeaky noise to get it's attention, it flew straight at me and perched on my 600mm lens hood ( lens hood list is now 5; Barn Owl, Spotted flycatcher, Robin, Kingfisher and Blue Tit) my other body had a 300mm on it and the 3rd was zipped in the Lowpro on the back seat, I tried to get the camera on my phone so I had a record of this astonishing moment, however the bleepy noises the phone made spooked the Owl back to the fence post, which was so disappointing!
However; Friday night, Steve, I and Paul Hackett set off on a marathon Owl Prowl around the lanes of Bedfordshire and North Hertfordshire, we got 8 Barn Owls, 7 Tawny Owls a Badger and a herd of Fallow Deer. 3 of the Tawny Owls allowed a very close and prolonged view and Paul was able to digiscope one of them.
All of the night shots here are uncropped with Canon EOS1DsMkIII and 300mm f2.8IS + 550EX flash, the first Barn Owl is with the 600mmf4IS on a 1DsMkIII
A huge amount of new Owl shots (and some older images) uploaded to my Flickr this week.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nigelblake/





2 comments:

Unknown said...

Those are amazing shots.

Anonymous said...

You really did get some astonishing shots here and the story you wrote with the post is sort of amazing. I guess it must be the sounds or something. I never saw an owl do these things. I have seen Screech owls pounce on field mice and rip them apart to eat them.

Since we have lived here since 1962, I have only seen one pair of Screech Owls and I used to hear hoot owls during the day talking to back and forth to each other, but nothing lately.