I am lucky enough to live up in the rolling hills of Lancashire. We are surrounded by beautiful countryside and also rugged scenery with waterfalls, rivers and valleys.

I like to go out on the weekend around dawn or dusk to get some landscape photographs with the sunrises or sunsets. I also do night photography and take landscape shots of the Milky Way or Orion or conjunctions of planets etc.

Until recently, I was never into wildlife photography I guess because I never really tried it.

Then one day driving to work in Yorkshire I stumbled upon a Barn Owl and was so impressed by it I decided to include some photos of birds of prey whenever I get a photo opportunity to take photos of them.

I was doing some landscape photography early one morning a while ago and I got talking to a guy who was all camouflaged, at first I didn't see him.

He asked me if I was doing wildlife photography and I told him it wasn't really my thing.

He started showing me some photos he had on his camera of a Long Eared Owl and said that it was the rarest owl species in the UK. It was very impressive.

Anyway, recently I returned to this area which is not too far from my house and parked the car and went for a walk with my camera.

The area is just south of Burnley in Lancashire.

As you can see its a nice scenic area where you can see for miles in all directions.

While walking I could hear this screeching coming from a tree and wondered what this was.

I got a bit closer to the source of this sound and still couldn't see anything. Then I heard a rustle from behind me in a bush and a man dressed in camouflage jumped out angry and telling me I ruined the shot. Then 3 other people jumped out from other bushes around and none of them were happy.

I was so new to this type of photography, I had no idea what kind of etiquette is needed among wildlife photographers. I told them I was sorry for scaring the bird away but how was I to know they were all there. I didn't even know that was a Long Eared owl. I had never seen one and certainly never heard one before.

So I just told them to go back to their little bushes and I walked on!

Then a little while later I came across an opening in the woods and could just see at a distance something that looked like a bird sitting on a stone wall.

I trained my 300mm zoom lens on this thing. It looked a bit like an owl but I was way out of range to see it clearly.

I started being extra quiet and stealth like moving closer to it, always keeping a bush or something in between me and it.

I got much closer and zoomed in, it looked like an owl but there was something not quite right about this.

To my horror I realised this was not an owl, it was a person with an owl mask on, standing behind a wall.

Now, if I was an owl and I saw a man dressed up as an owl, it would scare the hell out of me. Way more scary than a person walking up to me with jeans and a t-shirt to take a photo.

I'm not sure what the thinking was behind all this but hey ho!!!

So I just signalled to this person as if to say "sorry dude, I thought you were a real owl!"

Very embarrassing, but I just got out of this area and walked along a path and got across this open moorland area and walked into another set of woods.

Just out of the blue I saw these huge wings fluttering on the ground. I froze on the spot. I was only 30 ft away from it. It was a Long Eared Owl. A real one!!

What an awesome sight!!

I just had time to grab my camera and hold it up to focus. At that point the owl took off.

Luckily he didn't go far he just flew up on to a stone wall that was just behind.

There I was, just me and the owl staring right at each other 30 feet away.

I used the manual focus to get as focused as possible and took a couple of shots.

It actually made me wonder why all the other photographers are wearing camo gear when this bird was not even phased at all by my presence.

He just stared at me and was also looking around behind him and pruning his feathers and didn't seem at all bothered. I was just wearing casual clothing with a black hoodie with writing on the front.

Although I didn't manage to get any photos of him in flight, I did get these shots which I was happy with for the first encounter.

So I would consider this an Owling success!!!

Danny

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