Sunday, May 10, 2020

May Snow

The flowering cherry in our garden finally ventured into flower just in time for the overnight  temperature to plummet to near zero, and for the wind to move into the north, strengthen, and start bringing in snow showers icy-fresh from the Arctic.

So we walked in the protection of Dunrobin woods, where the snow - just visible as white streaks in this picture....

....organised itself into neat, uniformly sized, rounded pellets.

We escaped lightly. As we wandered home along the beach what looked like a giant tornado cell passed to the north of us, perhaps crossing over Brora on its way out to sea. Not that we were too worried about it as we had reverted easily to wearing full winter wet-weather gear and were too interested in what was going on around us, because masses of....

....swallows, sand martins and house martins were zooming low along the seaweed line, presumably catching insects while....

....a mixed flock of ringed plovers and dunlin (above) were working the shore just in front of the rising tide and....

....old man heron was out fishing just offshore.

As we walked up the storm beach to regain the path we stepped across masses of bird's-foot trefoil, often called eggs and bacon plants. Perhaps to cheer us up we should rename it the sunshine flower.

No comments:

Post a Comment