Getting a good view of owls hunting is thrilling. Their
graceful surveys of the area and high-speed, high-precision darts to the ground
are extraordinary. But they can be picky creatures, favouring still, dry
evenings. In the stark flatlands of East Anglia, this makes choosing the
perfect evening to spot them somewhat tricky. We live about half an hour away
from Wicken so at best we can guess based on our weather and the forecast what
the conditions will be like there. On our most recent visit we got it slightly
wrong. It was a beautiful evening but deceptively blustery. “You won’t
see much out there tonight, too much wind”, muttered a birder who had ventured
further onto the Fen but was now returning, defeated, to his car.
Slightly disheartened, we continued nonetheless towards a
spot where we have seen the owls before. As we stood waiting, with the wind
battering our faces, we started to lose hope of spying the fleeting birds. Then
all of a sudden, in a ghostly flash, a barn owl rose from behind the bank of
the lode and darted into the russet undergrowth. This wasn’t the type of owl we
had come looking for, but obviously we were delighted. Despite the gusts, we
watched entranced for a few minutes as the barn owl stealthily hunted. Then,
just as suddenly as he appeared, he shot down below the raised bank and out of
sight.
We thought that we had been lucky for this brief show and
assumed that we probably weren’t going to be in for any more treats. But we
were wrong. Just minutes after the barn owl had disappeared, a large bird
appeared from behind us and shot behind the bushes. We were pretty sure what we
had seen but the apparition had been so brief and unexpected that we had to
wait to be sure. As the bird rose again from behind the foliage, his black eye
mask, wide facial disk and piercing yellow eyes gave away his identity. At
last, a short-eared owl!
He too stayed for only a few minutes to hunt, before darting
into the distance, his image dissolving into the darkening sky. I was a little
disappointed that we didn’t have the opportunity to get any good photos of the
owls but generally pleased that the unfavourable conditions hadn’t entirely
deprived us of an encounter with these striking birds.
As we were about to leave, I noticed out of the corner of my
eye a fluid black mass dancing in the sky, far in the distance. A mighty
murmuration of thousands of starlings was sweeping through the air, each bird
synchronised with the one beside it, as though all the birds had combined to
become one entity. As this was my first murmuration sighting, I was
particularly enthralled. The mass twirled throughout the sky, becoming at times
nearly invisible and then suddenly bold and inky as they turned all at once in
their harmonised flight. Gradually the mass decreased, as from time-to-time
small groups broke off and shot down into the trees to go to sleep. We kept
anticipating that the whole conglomeration was about to disappear as they would
teasingly dip close to the treetops, but then at the last minute shoot up
again. As we watched enraptured, it was suddenly as if a responsible starling
had called “LIGHTS OUT IN 5 MINUTES!” because the airborne assembly all at once
dived for the nearest woodland canopy. The starlings knew that it was time for
bed and had sunk into the trees to roost for the night. We took their departure
as a cue for us to leave.
This is one of the things that I love about nature – its
unpredictability. We had come out with our minds set on finding owls, but were
also treated to one of the most beautiful, entrancing, and moving displays that
this country has to offer, on a reserve which isn’t even famous for its
spectacular murmurations. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t immediately
lose heart if your target species is being elusive – there might be something
even more spectacular just around the corner.
