New camera and birds watching

Edinburgh is lovely, but no city smells the same way Sheffield does. The moment we get up onto the hill I can smell the moors, a clean, pure smell of good air from over the park, green and damp and refreshing.

When I get home, to Sheffield, this weekend, there is a delightful present waiting for me. Some weeks ago I bought a new camera on ebay, a used Olympus E510, with two lenses. And it's there, waiting for me, all ready to go. I can't wait to go outside and try it out, but first things first – for an hour I curl up with Skinnytoes and the instruction manual. Then we venture out, and snap, just to get a feeling of the camera. I immediately love the second zoom lens, which goes up to 150mm – all of the sudden great shots are much easier, and I spend a long time hunting small birds and squirrels. It's not until the day after the camera shows its real potential though. We go for a long and varied walk, starting off along the river, then climbing up through the forest towards the moors, across the moors into the forest again, and back at the river. There is a lot of bird activity, but spring is so late this year there is no foliage at all to obscure them from view. We catch a sight of a woodpecker, but he's too quick and too far away to be photographed. We get an unusual display of singing from three greyish-brown birds though, displaying and puffing up their chests in bramble bushes, unusually bold. They look sparrow-like, but sing prettily; later, after long consultations, we decide it was a dunnock.

Singing dunnock.

We're on the way back when we when the most exciting sighting occurs. We were criss-crossing fields on a steep slope and stop for a moment to look at a rabbits' den, when from the pine tree above us, noiselessly, a brown owl takes off and glides smoothly to the next group of trees below. I kneel down and start putting on the zoom lens when another one appears, and follows the same route. I look for them for a while but, slide down the slope and the noise I make falling scares them away, I see them slide glide even further down, and give up. We were already on the road when Skinnytoes spies one in the tree, a clump of brown+reddish feathers. I hold my breath and creep, but the owl sees me and looks down, straight at me, from its high perch. It's not bothered by my presence, though. What is, however, getting on its nerves is a group of small birds, perhaps blue tits, who are chirpig excitedly around it. It seems the owl is being mobbed. I watch it try to ignore them, half-closing its eyes like a lazy cat in the sun. But the birds are not giving up, and in the end the owl takes off in a proud, graceful way, and glides back up the slope and into the forest. At home we decide it must have been a tawny owl, and I am officially in love with my new camera.

Tawny owl looking regal.