Gender Bender ?

Having worked in an area where half a dozen Short-eared Owls were regularly hunting for a couple of weeks,  I decided that now was a good time to narrow my sights down to one bird.

I selected one large colourful specimen that regularly used the field fence posts in one particular area to rest and hunt from.  I moved my tripod mounted camera set to remote shutter release in to about fifteen metres from this birds favoured post and selected a low angle of view that included some 'Purple haze' heath and hedgerow detail and backed away a hundred metres and tucked into the hedgerow and waited.

Sod's Law then dictated that I then spent a couple of frustrating hours while my bird landed on ever other post but the one that I was covering until finally it landed on the right one.

Following a bit of a full body plumage shake-out illustrated above my bird decided that it was time for a snooze shown below and judging by its amount of mascara and eyelash extensions I think it was probably a female  but  'whooo' knows in this gender bending world that we live in !!

My bird suddenly picked up on the sounds of a vole rustling through the rough grass field  in front of it and was off again in a flash but not without leaving me with the sequence of take-off images posted below.