Dark

Sun and cloud was the Met Office's promise for the owl field today. Well, they were half right. 

When I set off from Evesham, where R and I had been this morning to finish our Christmas shopping (yay!), things did not look promising up on the scarp, and I said a few choice words in the direction of the Met Office, but it was nearly a fortnight since I'd seen an owl, so I pressed on anyway. When I arrived at 12.30pm there were photographers everywhere, but some of them were leaving (always a worrying sign), and one told me that he'd been there since eight and hadn't seen anything other than a kestrel. "And now it's too dark," he said, "and the wind's getting up. There's no point staying." I thought there was a fair chance that he was right, but I didn't get where I am today by taking sensible advice, so I just smiled and went on my way, round to the north side of the field.

Where I stood, unoccupied, for the next two hours. It wasn't especially cold, by owl field standards, but the wind was cutting, and I was glad of the new coat I bought last week, which is so heavy it's like wrapping yourself in a winter weight duvet plus a gravity blanket, and has a massive hood for hiding inside when the temperature starts to really drop. Aside from my knees and feet, which did get cold, I was relatively comfortable - not by any means a given, while owling - but I was very, very bored. As, clearly, were the other fifteen or so people spread along the wall: when a Pheasant landed close by, the four people nearest to me almost tripped over each other in their efforts to get into position to photograph it.

By the time the first Short-eared Owl appeared, at about half past two, the light was already pretty bad, but after all the waiting around the excitement along the wall was almost tangible. I changed position a few times over the next hour - mobility being one advantage of shooting hand-held, rather than using a tripod - and that meant that I rather lost track of which owls were where, but there were certainly four flying at one point, and I suspect probably more. This is the one of which I have the best photos, because it quartered the field multiple times at a nice distance from the wall, but by the time I took this, just after 3pm, dusk was falling fast and I was already having to push my ISO and drop my shutter speed. Twenty minutes later I accepted that the exposure triangle had beaten me, and called it a day.

Someone on my socials pointed out yesterday that even though we haven't yet reached the shortest day of the year, we've already seen the earliest sunset. For the next three weeks sunrise will continue to get later, but from tomorrow sunset will start getting later too - imperceptibly at first, by a minute every few days, but it will be happening. If, like me, you struggle through the dark months, that's definitely something to celebrate.