Tuesday, March 30, 2021

What Have We Done?


Today's walk along the beach to the southwest of Golspie started well - to begin with, the forecast rain was holding off and, as the morning progressed, the sun showed his face - and it was also good to find that the sea had kindly returned most of the beach sand which it borrowed for the winter. However, from there on it became an increasingly depressing perambulation, because for me one of the great pleasures of walking is observing....

....the wildlife, and from this perspective Golspie beach and the sea off it are, at the moment, a desert. One guillemot, one merganser, one cormorant, two oystercatchers and a scattering of common gulls were all that we saw out to sea, while along the line of the....

....rising tide we found a few shells, the broken carapaces of some crabs, some egg cases from the common whelk, scattered strands of weed, a few tree branches, and two of those wretched throw-away plastic water bottles.

We used to think the beach at Felixstowe was pretty barren but I never believed I would walk a Scottish beach as destitute as this one. What's going on? What have we done to our world?

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