Yesterday was one of those rare days where everything just clicked into place.
The couple of days before had been foul weather and yesterday it was forecast bright sunshine nearly all day.I figured that the raptors would have had little opportunity to feed in the bad weather so they would be making the most of the sunny conditions.
I walked to my favoured spot and there were some good signs on the way. A female hen harrier was hunting distantly and a male flew up from the saltmarsh. Three short eared owls took flight.
I got into position around 10am and within the hour a male hen harrier flew past at fairly close range. The female stuck to the back of the field too distant for photographs. A couple of marsh harriers were hunting distantly, a kestrel was hunting nearby and a sparrowhawk made a couple of low darting flypasts in typical fashion. It all quietened down across midday and then I was made awaye of a bird above me given away by its shadow-I looked up and it was one of the male hen harriers-we were eyeball to eyeball bo more than 5m apart! Needless to say it drifted off once it clocked me and gave no chance of photos.
A call from a friend said that he had one of the males quite close. By now the sun was movong round so I decided to move.
I wasn’t at my new spot for long before the female re-appeared-still a long way away away but a good sign.
Not long after one of the males made a close fly-by and then almost immediately another one appeared and caught a vole. They stayed around distantly for a while then the light started to go. As we made our way back a couple of short-eared owls performed well with one giving a close fly-by.
My new gear really came into its own-most of the hen harrier shots were taken with the teleconverter engaged giving an effective focal length of 840mm. The images have then been quite heavily cropped so when I said close fly-by, that would be around 60m away.
The weather looks pretty grim for the forseable future so it may be a while before i go back again-no doubt the winter sun really does make the images.
Until next time, thanks for reading.
