Winter's a predominately grey season so it's heartening that so many of our recent days have started with a spectacularly colourful dawn, as did today. The colours only lasted about half an hour but they certainly got us off to a cheerful start - which continued when....
....our walk through Dunrobin woods, taken to avoid having to fight our way along the coast path into the teeth of a bitterly cold and occasionally wet southeasterly wind, yielded more warm colours, in the form of upward of thirty scarlet elf cups. It's a mystery to me that this particular fungus species does so well in this weather while there's hardly another fungus to be seen.
Our walk passed masses of snowdrops. It's always difficult to estimate such things but it does seem to me that this has been an exceptionally prolific snowdrop season.
We returned along the coast track, with the wind now behind us, seeing more in the way of shore birds than in recent weeks including....
....a lonely redshank and, in the stubble of the barley field at the back of the beach, no less than....
....seven curlews, presumably feeding on the grain dropped during the harvest. We also saw far too may crows, the large winter-resident flock of rock doves, various gulls, a dozen cormorants on their usual rocky peninsula, and....
....one dead juvenile cormorant, happily the only corpse along the high tide line.
Winter's a predominately grey season so it's heartening that so many of our recent days have started with a spectacularly colourful dawn, as did today. The colours only lasted about half an hour but they certainly got us off to a cheerful start - which continued when....
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