Time to stop and stare

W H Davies was right when he bemoaned:
A poor life this if, we full of care,
have no time to stop and stare.
All too often we see a group of gulls and write them off as noisy quarrelsome beasts not helped by their habit of feeding on unsightly rubbish dumps. However take the time to stop and stare at them and one realises the subtlety and beauty of their plumage.
This adult Herring Gull, daintily stepping over a scallop, was one of many feeding on the scraps left on scallops that had been through the Kallin Shellfish factory. We had just been to the fortnightly Kallin lunch - an event put on by a rota of the Grimsay islanders to help bring the community together. An enjoyable, and tasty, event, better even than scallop scraps.