There were plenty of other birds around; goldfinch, reed bunting, whitethroat being seen and others heard. Swallows were swooping low over the wheat fields in the still air. I ambled along the lane and off across a public footpath toward a small drain. There was hardly a sign of human activity, just a tractor spraying a crop a few fields away. The light was soft and warm and despite only having the 70-300 with me I took some pleasing, if not superb, landscape pics. One good thing about telephotos for landscape photography is the way they compress distance, making shapes more graphic on the picture plane. Wide angles get too much detail in, which when viewed small becomes visually meaningless. Telephotos give things more impact. Well, that's my thinking.
After retracing my steps to the car I carried on my journey, heading for a field where I had watched wheatear, yellow wagtail and skylarks earlier in the spring. It was a pleasant change to park up and walk the track in t-shirt rather than sweatshirt, fleece, woolly hat and mittens! The migrants had long departed, but the larks were still to be heard and occasionally seen, along with oystercatchers passing over head.
I was scanning the wheat for lark activity, I'd seen one perch briefly on an ear of teh crop, when I saw a dark shape that I thought might have been a male reed bunting's head in amongst the wheat close to the track. I approached it slowly and as quietly as I could, realising almost too late that what I could see was the dark tips of a hare's ears. Definitely the closest I've ever got to a hare. I managed to fire off a couple of frames of the ear tips before the animal spooked. I say 'spooked' but it just loped off slowly betraying it's presence only by the swaying of the wheat until it broke cover and was away, still not at top speed.
That was my lot, the light was going and I'd run out of ideas for places to visit. Time for home and a cuppa.
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