{"id":875,"date":"2007-06-28T00:06:59","date_gmt":"2007-06-27T23:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/archives\/875"},"modified":"2013-11-24T21:16:45","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T21:16:45","slug":"missed-opportunities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/missed-opportunities\/","title":{"rendered":"Missed opportunities"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The damp weather persists and has largely put paid to lunchtime excursions with the camera, though I did manage to dodge most of the showers today. Which was great but I missed the best shot of the day&#8230; which suggests some sort of theme for today&#39;s entry.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#39;ve known for a while that we have stoats locally, and I know where supposedly they hang out. I&#39;ve also seen the evidence of their kills. But until today I&#39;ve never actually seen one. I was up by some woods about half a mile from their &#39;base&#39; when one emerged briefly and trotted quite sedately across a corner of a field before vanishing into the undergrowth. I had a perfect view, but as luck would have it the camera had been packed away out of the rain. So  a  perfect missed opportunity. To compensate I took a photo of the view from the spot where I nearly photographed a stoat.<br \/><span class='imgcenter'><img alt='' src='https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/downs_2706077359.jpg' \/><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>And while I&#39;m talking about shots that never were, I saw the shy cub out playing late last night (early hours of Wednesday). It was rushing around at the rear of the garden, while I kept still and some distance back. Here&#39;s the resultant shot.<br \/><span class='imgcenter'><img alt='' src='https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/fox_cub_shy_2706077337.jpg' \/><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>And even the woodmouse tricked me this evening, deciding to scarper over the back of the feeder having seemingly settled into a perfect cute pose on the lid.<br \/><span class='imgcenter'><img alt='' src='https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/woodmouse_2706077380.jpg' \/><\/span> <\/p>\n<p>This next one is not quite a missed shot. There was a small pile of feathers in the garden this morning. Obviously the work of foxes,  the giveaway sign (apart from the sheer improbability of it being caused by anything else in our garden) being that the tips of the feathers are broken. Birds of prey are much more careful in their plucking, and the feathery remains of their work display perfect, unbroken feather tips. I&#39;ll keep my eye open for an example and post a comparison if I come across any. But as a rule: broken tips equals foxes; perfect plucking equals birds of prey.<br \/><span class='imgcenter'><img alt='' src='https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/feathers_2706077338.jpg' \/><\/span> <\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1137],"class_list":["post-875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-nature","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.permuted.org.uk\/photography\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}