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.

Saturday, 14 January 2012

Something different....

Blogs, websites, on line photo albums, social networks etc etc.......Cyber space has been completely saturated with images of SEO's recently...........and rightly so!

This winter has seen an influx of continental birds gracing our shores and the budding paparazzi among us have been filling our boots! Trouble is the majority of the images are a very similar, either a flying bird over grassy pasture or perched up on some fence or twig. Now when it comes to flight images I have hundreds, so I am well entrenched in that society but there really isn't anthing different. I'm still waiting to attain the perched up image, hopefully that will be soon so I can join that club too.

So I wanted to get something a bit different, but what? There really isn't much of an option there! The only thing I could work on was a different background, so my plan of attack was to set myself up in an area where a flying bird would offer just that and now finally I have achieved it, with the help of a dark hedgerow. The light was just magical' the bird a little more distant than I would have liked, hence some harsh cropping, but it is different.

What do you think, does it work?

7 comments:

Christian said...

It certainly does Paul - its a super sharp image with fantastic light, as you say. I can't take my eyes off that stare!

Skev said...

Looks good to me Paul. Did you see my vidiclip from Cossington earlier in the week? Get yourself over there - you might be able to get a shot with an Exmoor Pony as a background!

Richard Pegler said...

Works for me Paul! So now you've thrown down the gauntlet again over SEO images, we've all got to work a little harder!!

ferreiro said...

espectacular una diagonal de lujo un saludo

Ramón Suárez said...

¡Vaya diagonal!, ¡vaya mirada!
La foto espectacular.
Saludos!!

Rid said...

Cheers for all your comments guys, yes Skev I did have a look at your video footage of the seo you posted. I think it was very effective how you managed to get the owl to drift in and out of focus whist dodging those dam thistle heads!

colin said...

Not bad.................hehehe