owls about that then!: POTW

Hi and welcome to my Blog, my name is Paul Riddle and I live in south Leicestershire, UK. Back in August 2007 my quest began to locate as many local Little Owl territories as possible. 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. After 7 years and countless hours out in the field I have detected over 200 different sites. With a thirst for a greater understanding of the owls a more comprehensive monitoring and nest box programme then commenced. This also now includes monitoring the local and very sparse population of Barn Owls, please pop back occasionally and catch up with the life and times of my owls and any other wildlife that I come across. I hope you enjoy your visit!!!

Friday, 19 April 2013

POTW

As many readers/followers of this blog will know I regularly upload my images to another website,

"Birdguides". It is a brilliant source for bird info, recent bird sightings and a super forum for other like minded folk to share their recent bird images. It is a very popular site, with approximately 10,000 individual visits/hits per day!!!

As you can image there are an enormous amount of images that get up loaded on a weekly basis, and many are of extremely high quality. Every week the Birdguides panel select what they deem to be the top ten images in that particular week and are awarded a "notable accreditation". They also have the unenviable task of singling out just the one image for their POTW (picture of the week). I guess by now you can see where this is going???? Yep that's right this week I was awarded the prestigious award of POTW, yippee!!!!

The image in question was of a Little Owl, no surprises there then? These birds have been occupying this particular nest site for the last five years. Their nest tree is situated smack back in the middle of a farmers field and access is only allowed when the weather is good and the grass is dry, yep not very often!! Therefore I hadn't visited this site for well over six months. In this instance we'd had a spell of dry weather that coincided with me getting my Landrover back on the road, a visit was well overdue. There had been some very light drizzle that made the bark on the tree darker in colouration with an additional sheen like appearance, mmmmm very nice. The Landrover was positioned at an advantageous angle and the wait then commenced. After an hours wait I was rewarded with the owl popping its head out of the hole and hey presto the image was captured!