Chouette

Here's the thing about Short-eared Owls: they're tricksy. You can look at the weather forecast, check the wind speed, calculate how long you reckon they might have to feed themselves up before migrating northwards again, and think that today you're bound to be onto a winner... only to discover that the owls have other ideas ackshully, and all your prognostications amount to very little. 

So. It was a perfect afternoon for owls up on the scarp, but the owls by and large decided to pass on it, and stay at home in the relative warmth of their little grassy tussocks. Standing at the north wall in 8°C with a biting breeze, I could feel my lifeblood deserting my extremities in a vain effort to keep my core warm, and my enthusiasm for the whole bird photography project departing at about the same rate. Chats with a couple of friends kept me going until half past four, but by quarter to five, with half an hour still to go till sunset, I was on my way back to my heated car seat and a flask of coffee. En route to the main road I stopped at the crossroads for a chat with Hillyblips, who'd seen no more action in that corner of the field than we had up on the wall, though she did score a late Barn Owl that I missed.

This shortie provided the north wall's one reasonable flypast of the afternoon, though it was much further away than we'd have liked. This isn't my best or favourite shot from the sequence, but I'm posting it because it shows both sides of the owl's face, and if you look at it full-screen you should be able to see that the pupil of the left eye, which is in sun, is contracted, while the right one, on the shadier side of the face, is dilated. I knew that owls can independently control the amount of light entering each eye, because LesTension told me about it a few weeks ago when he sent me a link to this article, but I'd never noticed the evidence in one of my own photos before today, and I think it's pretty cool.

Which brings me fairly neatly back to the title of this post. When I put up my favourite of yesterday's owl images on Bluesky, one of my followers who is French reposted it with the comment "Le superb owl, c'est très chouette." He then explained that 'chouette' is one of the French words for owl, but that it's also used colloquially to mean 'great' or 'cool'. This factoid pleases me more than just about anything I've heard so far this year, and I'll probably be boring owling friends with it for the rest of the season. I wonder what the French is for 'tricksy'?