Now this is not my usual sort of image. Not at all. But with the neighbourhood vegetation reduced to a tangled, unsightly mat of dead stems and leaves and most of my beloved critters safely overwintering out of sight in one state or another, what is a girl to do. Here in the central Italian Apennines, winter lasts from November right through March and well into April, so to stave off the seasonal onset of arthropod withdrawal symptoms, I decided to turn my hand and my lens to other less sporadic life forms, in other words, birds and mammals. That isn’t something I’ve ever really tackled before, in fact, I’ve always found it tough to photograph anything larger than a dragonfly. But it’s definitely time for a new challenge, so these last few days have seen me wandering through my oak woods burdened down with a nifty new telephoto lens, the OM 100-400mm F5.0-6.3 MKII. Yes, it is a bit heavier than I’m used to, but actually nowhere near as much as I’d feared and it’s worth it for a chance to see the world through yet another different perspective.