walkies, birds and trees

Nine mile (15km) walk yesterday, around yet another stretch of foreshore.

Three birds that live in different ways. A magnificent black thing with a flesh-tearing beak.

A long-beaked urban scavenger, probably originally designed for wading through molluscs and eating  them.

And the one that looks like a burnt-out Concorde is, I believe, a new caledonian shag.

Good skies. Splendid dead tree.

Weird tall solitary tree.

The cellmate standing beside a life-form akin to the lesser young Albert, originally spotted in 1970.

outdoors

Last week I chopped up one of the two falling-over trees. Not ideally how I want to spend my time, but neither do I want to be surrounded by jungle. And the tradesman option would be almost as much work, except that you also get to pay. I used a chainsaw-on-a-pole, a great contraption.

The sawing was the fun part. The bundling up was a pain.

The weekend walk was a 5-hour affair, on level ground and in bright sunshine for a change.

Darwin and I

Charles Darwin and I both dropped out of medicine in Edinburgh before roaming foreign lands to observe unusual biological specimens.

This creature is clearly dead. If there was any life in it, the dog would have taken an interest in it. It may have been electrocuted while running along overhead power cables, but the dog is wearing a protective muzzle in case it may have been possum flu.