Oat in the Wild
Wildlife photography from the riverbank —
birds, water, and the small things in between.
CLOSE TO HOME
I keep going back to the same few fields. The light shifts, the birds come and go, and I still haven't run out of things to look at.
Most of it happens before six, half a mile from my front door. A kingfisher on the same low branch. A fox crossing the lane like it owns it. None of it waits for me, so I learned its hours instead.
I don't arrange anything. I sit down, I get cold, and I stay longer than makes sense. Most mornings I come home with nothing. That's the trade.
Field Notes
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“The river doesn’t perform. You just have to be there often enough that it stops minding you.”
The Archive
08 photographs
About
I photograph under the name Oat in the Wild
It started five years ago as a reason to be outside, and turned into the same footpath, the same bend in the river, in whatever weather turned up. Five years on one stretch of water teaches you where the kingfisher perches, which bank the vole uses, and how long a buzzard will put up with a man standing very still.
I shoot on evenings and weekends, so the light is usually going or already gone. Nothing is baited or arranged. If a picture needed a long lens and three cold hours, that is what it got.
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