ML561568011

Age and sex

Adult Female - 1

Observation details

Lifer! Female. Not sure where she’d have come from, as the game preserve next to me only releases pheasant and chukar, and has anyway been inactive for almost a month now. I was reading the news in bed this morning when I heard a very loud piping call right on the other side of the wall, at which point I jumped up and found myself staring at a bobwhite through the glass basement door. It called again before it caught sight of me and started to slink off. I went after the bird barefoot and without my glasses but with my camera - which I soon realised didn’t have its card. At this point I took thirty seconds to grab both that and my glasses, but when I came back out she’d vanished. I scoured the woods and gave up, until four hours later (at noon) she began calling incredibly loudly from just behind the run-in shed in the dog yard. When I investigated I accidentally flushed her onto the roof of the shed, but after a bit she jumped back down in front of me, giving me very close views and photo opportunities as she made her way past me and then down to the edge of the woods. I refound her tucked in the brush there and took a few more photos before leaving her alone. (Probably best that I flushed her and pushed her away anyway - she was calling less than twenty feet from the active fox den under the next shed.) Left for a fortuitously short shift at work soon after. According to my parents she returned to the pool yard while I was gone to eat under the feeders.

Technical information

Model

Canon EOS 7D

Lens

TAMRON SP 150-600mm F/5-6.3 Di VC USD G2 A022

ISO

640

Focal length

552 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire

f-stop

f/10.0

Shutter speed

1/400 sec

Dimensions

4471 pixels x 3353 pixels

Original file size

4.74 MB