Right place, right time!

Yesterday evening I was out with Daz doing a spot of "general birding" in the south of the county. We hadn't seen much of note apart from a single fly past Red Kite. We weren't surprised that none of our main target, Little Owls hadn't been seen as the weather was very intermittent,  one minute sunny the next it was pouring down.

As we ventured along the lanes of South Leicestershire we neared a body of water (no not Rutland) where we parked up to see what was about. A couple of Little Egrets at distance, a few Tufted Ducks out in the middle, plenty of Sand Martins skimming the waters surface feeding on flys, a Grey Heron in the reeds and several circling Buzzards up high.

Then out of the blue a flying Osprey came into view!!! It was flying straight across the lake towards us. Through my binoculars a fish could clearly be seen in its talons. At the time neither of us had our cameras out and before we knew it the bird had passed overhead without a single image being taken.

As the bird was flying away from us it seemed to be keeping parallel to the lane where we were parked, we were soon in the car and in pursuit.  As I drove Daz kept an eye on the bird and within a minute we'd caught it up and then overtaken it. Once we had managed and good lead we pulled up and got the cameras out, we then waited and as if to order the Osprey deviated slightly away from the fields and flew straight at and over us!!!

All of this action, from stopping the car to the Osprey flying overhead was over in a matter of seconds, luckily I have pre-set a custom function on my camera for just such indecencies, I turned the dial to this setting and prayed I'd be lucky! I did manage a sequence of 14 images with these two above images probably being the best? 

A superb encounter and a great bird to see, especially as it had a fish in it's talons. Obvious we have no idea as to where the bird was going, I suppose it could have been a bird from the Rutland breeding programme that was having a wander about (although that's miles away!) or maybe a Scottish bird still on it's way north or even better still maybe a bird that has set up a new territory in Leicestershire?

Thanks for stopping by, catch up again soon..............