HOLIDAY, NOVEMBER 2014 (12) - MANCHESTER BEACH

NOVEMBER 05 (Cont’d)

Sometimes you just get lucky.

Sometimes, even I get lucky(!)

As we were returning to the car, leaving Manchester Beach and about to head off towards Point Arena lighthouse, I took a quick look at the small hillock masking the view of the beach from the car park, noticed that there was a bit of a path worn into it by previous ramblings, and wondered whether there might be a nice view of the beach to be photographed from the top of it.

Naturally, the young couple who’d climbed up it a few minutes earlier, (presumably stimulating my peripheral vision enough for me to notice the hillock at all), and who were now settling down nicely in a hollow a few hundred yards ahead of me might have been less pleased to find some long-lenses fellow strolling along behind them, but they swiftly vanished from my mind as I realized that the dunes stretched on for those several hundred yards and more, and the beach was not to be seen.

What I did see, however, not so very far over to my left, was a row of fence poles and perched upon one of them was what looked to me to be a very fine ooking young raptor.

I swiftly ran off a swift photograph or two before wondering whether, just whether, it might still be there if I scrambled quickly back down the hill towards the car park and took the other little path running next to the very fence upon which it was sitting.

So I hurried around and got to a point close enough to get a couple of decent shots, and I tried to get a little closer and get a couple more… and still it sat there, and it continued to sit there until I was within about eight feet of it, before finally flying off having given me what I consider to be one of my luckier moments of the entire trip.