Gently smiling jaws

Day 4729 of this beastly cold, and I'm thoroughly fed up now. I even did another covid test today, just in case the last one was wrong, but got the same negative result. This at least made me feel able to say "Well, b*gger it then - I'm going out," even while the more grown-up half of my brain was telling me that going back to bed would be much more sensible.

I got to the Water-level Hide at Kemerton at about half past two, and found one other person in there, whom I didn't recognise. In my defence he was wearing a balaclava, but even so I was mortified when our conversation (largely driven by him, and largely shut down by me) brought us to the point at which I mentioned the name of a well-known Worcestershire photographer of my acquaintance, and he replied "That's me! I'm him!!"

Oh, how we laughed! Well, he did - I apologised profusely, drew my head down into my coils of scarf like a turtle, and concentrated thereafter on trying to be a bit more friendly.

When I left the hide at 4.30 the sun was dropping fast, and taking the temperature with it.  Not that it had been warm in the building - with the peak afternoon temperature at around 5°C, and all the open windows letting a chilly breeze waft through, a balaclava would actually have been a pretty good idea. As it was I'd followed Siberian advice and dressed like an onion, but that hadn't protected my extremities, and when I tottered out into a lovely 1° sunset I discovered that I couldn't feel either my hands or my feet, and was only vaguely connected to my knees. Thus it was that when I got into the car and poured myself a cup of hot coffee from my waiting flask, I didn't realise that I hadn't screwed the lid of the cup on properly until quite a lot of the coffee had run down from the imperfect seal and dripped all over my leg. It's called suffering for your art, apparently.

Back at home, R said, "Get anything?", to which I replied, "Well, I hope I've got an otter, because there wasn't anything else." On uploading my files this turned out not to be quite true (though the lake had been almost eerily quiet): I did get a couple of reasonable shots of a little grebe, and an acceptable one of a pair of gadwalls in flight. For the record, there had also been a rapid fly-past by a kingfisher, and a cronk-past by a raven, but neither of these made it onto the camera. So yes, the otters were the stars of the afternoon, and though they never came really close to the hide they did give a few nice photo opportunities, most of which I managed to catch. In isolation from the other two (who were both underwater at this moment) I can't tell if this is the mother or one of the pups, but the lifted head and gaping smile suggest that his or her previous dive had netted some small prey item, which was just in the process of being swallowed.