It's coming up to mid-winter and the weather here is behaving appropriately, alternating dangerously icy conditions with days of miserable rain. Today has been one of the latter, relatively warm but with almost unremitting rain and low, grey overcast.
We dressed accordingly in full waterproofs and walked through Dunrobin woods, returning by the shore path, where we saw the usual paucity of wildlife - a curlew, two redshanks, six cormorants, a small flock of about twenty rock doves, a few crows, a gull or two, including a black-backed gull, two pipets and....
There are moments in life when the brain cannot quite cope with what it is seeing - in this case, definitely a rock on the move down the beach, not twenty metres away; and it was only as the rock reached....
We've never before seen a seal along this section of beach. We see them offshore, and there's a point about a mile beyond Dunrobin Castle where there can be half-a-dozen basking on rocks, but never on this section, perhaps in part because it is so frequented by dogs. It seemed perfectly all right, sliding into the sea and then surfacing a few metres offshore, as if looking back at us with some annoyance at being disturbed.
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