When you think about the animal kingdom there are hierarchies just like in most systems – different exemplars of the type can be arranged into descending order according to various attributes they may display. Sometimes it’s handy in making sense of the whole by arranging its constituents in this way: big to small, hot to cold, sharp to blunt. And so on.

It’s whole the basis of that card game we played as kids: Top Trumps. Each card contained a pic and a few facts about one example of a thing that has many examples – let’s say cars for the purposes of illustration. If you’re playing the cars version of Top Trumps, your card may have all the details of the Ferrari 308 GTS (the Thomas Magnum Ferrari, and therefore a prime piece of ‘80s iconography): engine capacity 2.0l; power 252 bhp; number of cylinders 8; and so on. You might feel that your power ranking is higher than that of any of your mates’ cards, so you’d bid: “power – 252 bhp.” But if your mate had, say, the Lamborghini Countach, they would shout, “Lamborghini Countach – 370 bhp!” And they’d have won.

Thus do small boys memorise many and various useless facts which remain in their brains when they’re middle-aged and can’t remember where they left their wallet.

Anyway, we digress. I was thinking about birds, and photographing them. I’ve been snapping away at the big, easy-to-see ones: Magpies, Rosellas, Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos. These may not be the Ferraris and Lamborghinis of the avian order, they’re more mid-range: maybe the Toyota Camrys or Volkswagen Passats. They’re common – interesting to a degree but not challenging in any way. In short, I’ve had my fill of shooting them.

So in the last few days I’ve been obsessing about the smaller birds which can be heard but not often seen about the place. You may say these are the avian Minis or Honda Civics – not necessarily adrenaline-boosting, not necessarily pretty or colourful – but harder to see. Every now and then, there’s a flash of something small in the middle of a bush and you can hear a high-pitched ‘cheep cheep’ – and being possessed of stalkerish instincts, I’ve been itching to capture these elusive subjects in pixel form.

But though you can hear them easily, seeing them is much harder. Which makes photographing them even more important as it’s sometimes the only way you can even identify them. Plus, as the smaller the bird, the more hyperactive they seem to be. You hear them cheeping away and move as unobtrusively as possible in the general direction of the sound. You defocus your eyes to detect movement. You spot a little blob and raise the camera to your eye. The blob is gone. Locating it through the viewfinder is impossible. It’s hopped to another branch – no, it’s dashed to another tree! Like a Renault Clio in rush-hour traffic, it’s dropped a gear, popped through a gap and flitted out of there.

Sometimes it’s like they know what I’m after and they’re happily just screwing with me. I’m poised with a ridiculous, cumbersome camera rig, trying to look like a tree and bobbing my head about to locate an erratically moving thumb-sized target. They wait until I raise the camera, then bounce to another branch before I can locate them in the finder. I step sideways, may bend the knees a little, and try again. They cheep cheerily and wing it to another tree. They’re laughing – I know they are.

Yesterday, after a late-afternoon trudge around the neighbourhood when the feathery little feckers were particularly flighty – yes, flighty – I returned home with few decent shots on the memory card. It was overcast, slightly drizzly, and the garden was quiet. No cheep-cheeping to be heard. I wandered down to the bottom of the garden, where a row of pear trees and a low hedge form the boundary with our neighbours’ garden.

I was hoping for a tiny featherball in dull colours, but what I got was unexpected. From under the low hedge burst something large – bigger than a crow, say, and more square, if you can determine these things in a moment of acute, hair-raising fright. There was a momentary impression of dark-brown bars over a lighter caramel base – and the bird rocketed over the hedge with two magpies in hot pursuit.

They all plunged into the foliage of a big pine tree across the road, and I followed in indecent haste, telephoto rig clutched in ever-optimistic hands. From the depths of the pine tree came the sounds of a confrontation. One magpie, then another, would emerge looking dishevelled and a bit freaked out. Back in they’d go. Whatever was in there was giving a pretty good account of itself, as eventually Heckle and Jeckle gave up and hung around in nearby trees, watching and waiting.

As did I, wondering if I could take a prize-winning photo of a hawk or owl savaging a magpie in mid-air. Commissions from National Geographic would follow: world travel, exotic locations, big game and small.  I tried approaching the tree from different angles but it was impossible to see into the dark interior of its branches. The magpies got tired or hungry and departed. And just as I looked directly up the trunk from below, the big bird  again burst out of cover and headed north at high speed.

I have no idea what it was – clearly a raptor, the Ferraris and Lamborghinis in your birdy Top Trumps, but there was no time to take that life-changing photo so we’ll never know. I suspect it was an owl, which may have stayed on its prey a little too long and been caught on the ground at daybreak with territorial magpies ready to make life unpleasant. And that’s when muggins here walked in, all unawares, looking for tiny birds and failing to see the big one under the bush.

If there’s a moral to be gleaned from all this, I don’t know what it is. But in the game of birdy Top Trumps, an owl is definitely better than a sparrow – and failing to play the owl card because you’re staring at the sparrow card makes you the loser.

Deep thoughts for a Saturday, no? There are times when you have to just shrug it off and look for the next opportunity – I hear there are wedge-tailed eagles near Mongarlowe where I sometimes ride my bike. Missed opportunities like the Ferrari Owl are only there to make you more observant next time you sneak about looking for feathery photo subjects, wherever on the hierarchy they lie.