Doing It In Reverse & A Shag!

The weather is so good at the moment that it is hard to beat walking in the countryside. Again we picked up my son's dogs and headed for Goodrich to do a walk we have done many times. (Walk 10 - Goodrich & Coppett Hill in Kittiwake Walking in The Wye Valley & Forest of Dean by Alistair Ross £4.95)

We know it so well that this time we decided to do it in reverse! It suited us really, as the dogs soon drunk the water we had and the Wye wasn't until the last 3 miles, which allowed them to swim and cool down.

The blip photo is of a Cormorant? on a dead tree. One local online photo club that signed me up has a standing joke of posting a bird on a stick photo. Well, this is my entry for this month! I did get a close up of it, but reckon the tree and detail in it add a lot to the overall image.

For those of you wondering, a Cormorant and a Shag are often confused... Wikipedia explains:

There is no consistent distinction between cormorants and shags. The names cormorant and shag were originally the common names of the two species of the family found in Great Britain, Phalacrocorax carbo (now referred to by ornithologists as the great cormorant) and P. aristotelis (the European shag). "Shag" refers to the bird's crest, which the British forms of the great cormorant lack. As other species were discovered by English-speaking sailors and explorers elsewhere in the world, some were called cormorants and some shags, depending on whether they had crests or not. Sometimes the same species is called a cormorant in one part of the world and a shag in another, e.g., the great cormorant is called the black shag in New Zealand (the birds found in Australasia have a crest that is absent in European members of the species). Van Tets (1976) proposed to divide the family into two genera and attach the name "cormorant" to one and "shag" to the other, but this flies in the face of common usage and has not been widely adopted.

And there you lot were thinking I had a dirty mind!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Another day of loads of possible blip photo's but I just like this one!