Dismal Weather

This is the sort of weather we're enduring at the moment, slushy snow and icy rain with temperatures hovering around zero giving a damp chill to the air, made worse when the wind decides to get up. The lack of sunshine is the most depressing part of it, and compensating for it with daily doses of vitamin D isn't quite the same, but we count ourselves lucky when we read about the weather that others in the UK are enduring at the moment.

The sleety slush tumbling out of a grey sky doesn't prevent us taking our daily walk, today's being up into the forestry below Beinn Bhraggie, mainly following mountain bike trails. There was more long-settled snow and some patches of quite slippery ice but the main thing I miss on such walks is....

....some excitement. The views are all closed down by the murk so we walk anxiously scanning the surroundings for something new growing, such as the recent snowdrops, or for a bird or a deer or.... well, just about anything that's new or a bit different.

The lack of bird life is evident in the woods. There's one point on today's walk which almost always has some goldcrests twittering in the dark Scots pines but this particular spot seems silent now. The only remarkable thing we found was....

....what might be a slime mould, several growing on a fallen Scots pine. It may be Reticularia lycoperdon, commonly known as the false puffball as it opens to reveal the same brown spores as the true puffballs.

The last days of a long winter are always the worst but we may have a lot more to come. March, given the chance, can be pretty miserable but at least by then the daylight hours have drawn out.