Bird project 5 - Long-eared owl

I went down to the mere, hoping to see the pintails sighted there yesterday. I started at the feeder hide, where all the common birds were having a riot. The only unusual thing was a sparrowhawk swooping in, but it was so fast I barely saw it. I met a friendly guy with a camera and scope, and it turned out he was the local council wildlife officer, whom I've been in contact with for nearly a year. He's been very helpful, but we'd never met, so it was nice to put a face to a name. It started to snow. He accompanied me round to another hide, but sadly neither the pintails nor an Iceland gull that had been seen the day before were present. Lots of teal, wigeon, mallards, coots, black-headed and herring gulls, cormorants - even a little egret flew in to roost. But then he offered to take me to the long-eared owls. A pair winter in the scrubland north of the lake each winter, and draw quite a large number of curious enthusiasts. Despite looking each time I've been in the past few months, I had failed to spot them.

I was grateful both for the expert advice, and a lift in a car the mile or so round to the opposite shore. Several other bird watchers were there, with scopes and binoculars, and he showed us where to look. As I suspected, there was no chance of seeing them without expert advice - even having them pointed out, the rest of us struggled to see.

5/101.
Asio otus Long-eared owl

Location: Hawthorn scrub, north of Marton Mere, Blackpool.
Conditions: Very poor light - thick cloud, late afternoon. Cold, snow turning to sleet.
Photograph quality: 2-3.
Comments: These birds are masters of camouflage, as you can see from the picture. If I hadn't had expert advice, and confirmation after I took some photos, I would never have known I'd seen one. The second bird was not visible from where I stood. As it is, the face of this one is obscured, as is much of the body, but you can make out some feather markings and its general shape.

I started with a 1.4x extender on my 500mm lens, although autofocus tends to fail when there are lots of fine branches in the way of a bird. I added a 2x extender as the subject was, thankfully, stationary. This meant I could mostly fill the frame, but sadly none of the shots were perfectly focused - conditions were hard, with the viewfinder and screen foggy and splattered with sleet, and the twigs fooling my eye as well as the autofocus. Still, it's quite clearly an owl in the photograph, and a little contrast and white balance adjustment have helped a lot. Just a very few thousand of these winter in the UK each year.