The sun rose this morning on a landscape transformed by blue skies and lingering snow: this is Loch Fleet at low tide with Beinn Bhraggie rising behind it. While I would have preferred temperatures overnight which would have cleared the snow, these really are....
....the sort of scenes for which one lives in Scotland. However, like everything in this country, there's a darker side as....
....high cloud obscured the sun and turned the entrance to the loch into shades of creamy-ochre and grey.
On the beach the level of the last high tide was clearly delineated, the area below it utterly devoid of anything washed up other than knots of seaweed, bivalve shells - mostly mussels from the eiders' feeding activities - and the remains of a few sea potatoes.
On the living side, we saw two seals, a small flock of what might have been sanderlings flying in close formation, a dozen oystercatchers, two curlews, a few gulls, a shag, and, out to sea, a couple of dozen eider.
I worry about this dearth of wildlife. I know we've only been here three years or so but in that time we've seen a dire fall-off in the wildlife numbers along the coastlines. Yes, we know that some species have been devastated by avian flu but why have the numbers of almost all species dropped off - with a few notable exceptions like the oystercatchers?
The sun rose this morning on a landscape transformed by blue skies and lingering snow: this is Loch Fleet at low tide with Beinn Bhraggie rising behind it. While I would have preferred temperatures overnight which would have cleared the snow, these really are....
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