I'm not a great lover of forests and trees, preferring open skies and wide horizons, so on a beautiful morning like this morning I wouldn't normally have chosen to accompany Mrs MW on her favourite walk through the Bheinn Bhraggie forestry to the village shops - but I'm so glad I did, because....
....all the birds in the woodland seemed to be out singing. So we started with a song thrush which was far more worried about getting his song heard by the local females than how close we were. Then, above him, a....
....wood pigeon began calling. In our time we've seen far too many of the wood pigeons of East Anglia which congregate in vast numbers in the region's extensive grain fields while these ones actually do what they're supposed to - live in the woods and only occasionally venture into our garden to share the small birds' food.
Then, high above them, we had....
....skein after skien of geese, too high for me to identify them though I suspect, from the way they first flew north and then flew back again, that these are still the pink-footed geese which have been doing this sort of daily to-ing and fro-ing all winter.
Meanwhile, back towards ground level, we were identifying, either by seeing or, using the Merlin app, by hearing, a variety of small birds: robin, wren, great tit, coal tit, chaffinch, goldfinch, chiffchaff, blackbird, song thrush, goldcrest, collared dove, and, suddenly, a tree creeper.
We haven't seen a tree creeper in ages yet we saw four in the space of an hour. They're not easy to photograph, particularly with my camera which has a nasty habit of focusing on everything except the bird, but I did, in the end....
....manage one half decent picture.
