Nothing....

.... to crow about.

I haven't mentioned the "o" word for a few days. For the first time this week, I went in search of the elusive Kendal otter again. At lunchtime I staked out the culvert where they have been seen, but there was no show. This is a time of plenty for fish-eating mammals, there are exhausted and dying salmon drifting downstream, spent after mating and spawning further upstream. So maybe by lunchtime, the otter family was well fed and lying up for the rest of the day.

So I settled for a photo of a carrion crow and a black-headed gull in winter plumage behind. I like the way they looked like a pair of sentries, keeping an eye to front and behind. The urban crows are more confiding than their country cousins, not surprising given the persecution in the countryside of crows as vermin for a bad reputation that is hardly justified by these intelligent and characterful creatures.

My apologies that I was short on comments last night. I watched Frozen Planet and the moving life and death struggle between a she wolf and a yearling bison. I found my loyalties shifting from one to the other as they bravely fought to the bitter end. When I was younger I found it easier to feel dispassionate about what is after all an entirely natural event. Not so these days.

After that our Broadband connection was playing up and I only managed to complete a few comments.

A year ago: by coincidence, another corvid, a rook at the Castlerigg Stone Circle.