Little Owl in Habitat

When I say habitat, these old field barns are where these owls perch, roost and breed so they are pretty important features. Unfortunately outside the Yorkshire Dales National Park many of the barns are being converted to small houses/holiday lets which is clearly pretty bad for the Owls. At least planning policies protect those within the Park boundaries for now, and hopefully this will continue.

The majority of passers by miss the Owls as they are so well camouflaged against the stone. I'm hoping to spend some time this year working on the Owls at a number of locations. They are great characters and seem to have a real attitude. This one gave me a glance over the shoulder just to say **** off!

7D 700mm ISO 320 1/60 sec @ f/5.6 slight crop taking sliver off left and bottom.

Thanks for looking

Simon

Hi Simon,
good invironment shot, I like the eye contact a lot.
you have right about these locations. Still we keep on taking away
living space of wild animals around the world in a terrible fast manner.
Bertl

Great natural setting lovely shot

Excellent Simon

The Owl is nicely framed by the window

I like all the extra background detail in this shot Simon. It helps to set the scene and the bird is just the right size in the frame for me. It looks to me like it might benefit further from a little more contrast and I would personally have tried to manouvere myself round to the left a bit if that were possible to sit the bird on the right hand third. That's not a serious crit, just my take on it.
Nice one.
eric

Hi Simon.
Bird fits the habitat very well,i like it a lot.

Keith.

You already know what I think of this Very nice work indeed

Thanks all. Eric, I know where you're coming from. Unfortunately the left hand edge of the window would creep into frame and with the poor light that day I couldn't get enough DOF to render it sharp. Something I will definitely be trying in future though, light allowing.