This week’s walk, which of course was last week, held a surprise or two.
I was meeting a friend, Mary, who had to drive up from Hampshire, so it was a later start at about 10.00am rather than the more normal 8.00am, and while the weather was cold it wasn’t what I would have called freezing.
I was clearly wrong though because in a number of places the lake was covered in a thin layer of ice.
Thick enough to support the weight of a bird and allow it to "walk on water” as I somewhat sacrilegiously thought.
Cue a few photographs
And what that made me do was look not only at the bird but the ice it was standing on and the reflection of that bird in the ice.
Reflections have been a theme of previous blogs but those have been about either my thoughts and musings on a subject or a reflection in water. Reflections in ice are different as they are neither glass like mirror reflections or ones distorted by ripples and waves. They are distorted, but by the texture of ice, which in this case reminded me of the texture of grain in a plank of wood.
Ice wasn’t the only surprise for Mary and me; another came when looking out onto one of the islands in the lake. I have seen terns, blacked headed gulls, greylags, Canada and Egyptian Geese, coots and cormorants there. I have also seen the occasional lapwing and less frequently 2 or 3 of them.
There were not 2 or 3, not 5 as I first thought
But as you can see there were 11 (though the quality of my shot may not be good as it should be to help you count them, or for me to be absolutely certain of the final number, if you clickon the image it should enlarge).
It was another enjoyable walk but I was a little worried that Mary had't really seen anything particularly unusual so I decided I would play my trump card or trump bird – Woody. He didn’t let me down and was there in his striking plumage complete with his reflection rippling in water, not ice.
Footnote: If the tile of the blog has planted an ear worm and you can’t get the song out of your mind you’re probably of a certain age. It was released in 1990 and you can watch the official video here; “Check out the hook while my DJs perform it”
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