Colours

We're reaching the time of year when we become used to winter landscapes, when the background colours are shades of grey through black with washed-out tints of a limited palette - blues in sky and sea, greens in the leaves.  Bright colours are so rare they stand out rudely, like....

....the brazen red in the robin's breast. This is the graveyard robin, distinguished by his white posterior, who is as brazen as his colour, now spending all his time in our garden, much to the discomfiture of the garden robin.

Even muted colours are noticeable. We saw this tiny bird in Beinn Bhraggie woods yesterday and had to wait some time for it to turn enough to confirm that....

....it was a goldcrest: we hadn't seen such peachy pinkness in the species before.

But here's an example of what might be termed 'colour inversion', where a small bird who decks himself in black and off-white stands out because his favourite haunt in amongst the orange berries of the sea buckthorn below Dunrobin Castle. It's a male blackcap, and we've recently seen his mate, so perhaps they have settled here for the winter.

Even the palest of pale colour is remarkable. A cherry - or is it an almond? - in the churchyard below our house has decided this is a good time to make a tentative offer of delicate flowers, which is kind of it as it is heartening to be reminded of what is in store if we can weather the storms of the coming deep winter.