Not a good day to be a mouse.

 This day I had been looking forward to for a long time, a lot of planning and preparations had gone on beforehand. It started the day before with a visit to collect some dead mice as bait, early to bed the night before with the alarm going off at "silly o`clock" the following morning. 

A drive to collect my fellow photographer, then I put the pedal to the metal and was away up the motorway, that's the nice thing about the early morning starts, the roads are empty, a quick stop at McDonald's for coffee, arriving at the hide just after 8am. 

After unpacking the gear, putting the bait out, we settled back to await the events of the day.  I was pleasantly surprised, within half an hour or so of being in the hide, the male Kestrel arrived. 

 

I was lucky to get this image, as to my left was a bush which partly obscured my view, it was from this direction the bird flew in from, believe it or not, this was the frame of the day.

The bird hovered, and then slammed into the post on which the  mouse had been fixed, as the title of this page says, "not a good day to be a mouse".  

Being able to watch from such a close distance this action taking place, is indeed a privilege. The action continued on and off till around lunch time where we had a lull of around two hours, I must admit, once or twice we were getting worried that we had the action for that day - how wrong can one be.  

Again the male returned, what a fantastic sight, the wings raised up to give a clear view of the beautiful patterning. 

By now we were giving up hope of seeing the female bird known to be on site, but with such great images already taken, no point in complaining. During the course of the afternoon, the visits to the prey still continued, on average the mouse lasted less then five minutes once the bird was upon it. 

The afternoon was progressing well with an increased number of visits, thank God for large capacity, high speed memory cards, there are times when they are needed.  It would have been nice to have had a visit from the female, but I believe she was sitting on eggs. But you can't have all you want!