The 4 Owl Challenge
So a couple of months ago I met up with Ollie and Jordey to go and photograph the short eared owls, and today we are back out with them because Ollie has come up with the four owl challenge. So the premise of the day is to try and photograph four species of British owls, the tawny owl, the little owl, the short eared owls and finally the barn owl, so we have a pretty epic day ahead.
Our first stop of the day was to visit the tawny owl, now this is the one that we are thinking is probably going to be the no show of the group, so not starting with our strongest in candidate for the four owl challenge, but logistically, this way worked out as the best order. The tawny owl sits in an absolutely massive oak tree in one of three possible hollows and all we have to do, is hope that it is sat in one of the holes that we can actually see into.
Having arrived and had a look through the binoculars things weren't looking promising, however we stuck it out in the hopes that the tawny owl might poke its head out even for the briefest moment. Being that we are on a bit of a time constraint, after about half an hour, we decided it would be unlikely that the tawny owl would move any time before dusk, so we decided to pack up our stuff and head towards the second location and hopefully see the little owl.
The little owl is probably the one that I am most excited about hopefully seeing today, I have seen them before on my little British owl trip last summer, however I've not seen one in the wild. We took a quick stroll along the canal to find where this little owl hangs out, and true to form, this little fella was sitting right outside his little hole in the tree.
Once we had set up our gear we were able to get some photos and videos, and I'm really happy that we were able to see it, now the one downside was that my line of sight to the owl wasn't clear, so there are a few out of focus sticks and tree bits in the way which is a bit disappointing, however that just means I'm going to have to go and find some more little owls in the future.
Having bagged our first owl of the day, and hitting 1 of the 4, for our challenge, we packed up our gear and headed to our third location to see the short eared owls.
It was absolutely Baltic here and having layered up we set up our tripods and waited for the short eared owls to show. We didn't have to wait too long before we got to have an absolutely magical experience, one of the short eared owls flew right in front of us to the point where I had to zoom my 600 mm lens out wider to actually keep the owl in the frame. Now I think here I may have been a bit overzealous on my zooming and probably could have kept at maybe 500 mm, but I was worried that I was going to cut some of the owl off.
I am really happy with the images that I got from this flyby of the owl, I remembered to keep my finger on the shutter to get as many shots as possible, ensuring that I had some keepers.
We didn't have to wait too much longer before we got to witness this one more time. The owl once again got really close to us, and it was just breathtaking having it so close and being able to photograph it. Again, I had to zoom out with my lens to make sure I kept it in the frame, and this time we were treated to the owl landing pretty much 30 metres in front of us. It was absolutely breathtaking to be able to witness something this special, never before if I had been this close to a wild owl. And it just stayed sat in the grass for a good 40 minutes, before we moved off.
Having gone through my images and edited them, I realise I did make a bit of a mistake here. I use my camera in the APS-C mode quite a lot to get a bit of extra reach when animals are quite far away, as I have found that with this camera and lens option, it can struggle with focus when the subject is really small in the frame, and this is what it was set in when I was photographing the owl flying past, as the owl had started much further out and flew towards us.
As I was in APS-C mode, that means all of my images in this sequence were shot in that crop mode which on the Sony A7iv is about 14 megapixels. Now while I am a little bit annoyed at myself for this, in the moment, everything happened so fast, the whole fly by and landing happened in about one minute, so I can use this as a learning experience. I am still incredibly happy with my images and for me, they're still going to be able to be printed in high resolution and go into my 2025 photo book of the year.
Having photographed owl numbered 2 of 4 we sat and waited it out to see if we could get some barn owls. We decided to head off further down the field as we had just seen one of the barn owls flying in that area. We set up a gear and waited it out in the hope that the barny would fly back up our way. However, the barn owl wasn't playing ball we ended up walking back up towards the car and waiting up by the wall there, but again the barn owl didn't show we did however manage to see the short eared owl again, and I got some nice backlit photos.
So that was the end of our day, I'm going to count that barn owl as a 1/2 owl, so we've got 2.5/4 because we did see it, we just weren't able to get any photos of it this time.
I'm really happy with the images that I got on this trip especially of the short eared owls, it is a shame that we didn't hit all four of our owls today, however that just means that we're going to have to try again.
I want to say a huge thank you to Ollie and Jordey for taking me along with them for the day and if you are interested in their work I have left some links to both of their Instagram pages.