owls about that then!: Snow good!

Hi and welcome to my Blog, my name is Paul Riddle and I live in south Leicestershire, UK. As far back as I can recall I have had an interest in wildlife and in particular birds, especially owls and raptors. In August 2008 I began my quest to locate as many Little Owl territories as possible local to where I live. The driving force was a reported decline in the uk numbers so I thought I would do my bit and conduct a study in my area. The majority of my allotted time so far has been dedicated to reach a target of a 100 sites, once achieved the searching will slow down and a more comprehensive monitoring and nest box programme will commence. Please pop back occasionally and catch up with the life and times of my owls, I hope you enjoy your visit!!!

UPDATE.....2011 will see my Little Owl study continue to gather momentum and on into its 3rd year, hopefully I will be able to reach my new target of locating 200 Little Owl sites. In addition to that I will also be monitoring the local Barn Owls too. From my observations they appear to be fairing worse than the Little Owls and their population in South Leicestershire is very sparse indeed. I will be implementing a similar nest box type programme and hopefully in time the numbers will increase.....

UPDATE.....2012 will see my nest box project gathering more momentum, but now I am concentrating mainly on Barn Owls. Their numbers are sparse here in south Leicestershire with only 3 or 4 known pairs! Currently I have made and erected 37 boxes with the kind help of "my team". But it is not enough, so my plan is to keep building and erecting new boxes as I want to create a corridor of boxes that will encompass each know breeding territory. They will all be located in suitable habitat then when the 2012 juveniles disperse they will hopefully not need to move too far before they settle down and establish their own "local" territory.

The Little Owls are doing just fine, my 3 year quest came to an end in Aug 2011, during this time I managed to record birds at 197 different Leicestershire locations (+ 5 out of the county), successful breeding was recorded at 114 of these sites . Currently we have made and erected 42 boxes, of which 7 were used in 2011, the plan for 2012 is to get this number up to 50 but with a different design to see if more occupancy can be achieved.

Sunday, 18 December 2011

Snow good!

This morning when I opened the curtains I was met with a light ground covering of snow, oh goodie! I'd been hoping for this for a while and it ment I could go and get some wintery images of some of the local owls.

I opted to visit my very reliable Little Owl site No 105 near to South Wigston, as usual a brief wait and the male owl emerged from its cozy nest hole, trouble was by the time I eventually arrived on site the snow had all but melted, dooohhh!

The light was pretty good most of the time which enabled me to get some nice images, but they are not what I was after.........not a snow flake in sight!

5 comments:

colin said...: Nice to see the little fellows back and nice images mate; 18 December 2011 18:27
Tammy said...: Great photos!; 18 December 2011 19:08
Richard Pegler said...: Yep! It's good to see the little ones again. Stunning images Paul!! Must do something about the LOs myself, as I've only seen one this month!; 18 December 2011 19:51
Christian said...: More belters mate.; 19 December 2011 17:13
Mike Randall Bird Photography said...: Terrific images Paul; 19 December 2011 20:22