Mrs Bullwinkle, less than 100 yards/meters from my campsite:
Brian
Actually, I realize this is a native “writing spider”, which is more unusual now.
We’ve got one like that in our yard. I just call it a “banana spider”, though I haven’t actually tried to identify it. She’s very determined to build a web across the path, so we have to be careful when walking not to break it with our face!
Thirty odd years ago we spent a day at Cuckmere Haven ( London, south til you hit the sea, right a bit) and … we saw little egrets. I can’t tell you how big a deal this was at the time. On the Monday I casually mentioned to a workmate, Jerry, who was a bit of a birder, that we has seen them. “Been to Chichester Harbour?”, he said (London, south til you hit the sea, left a bit). No, actually - so there were two places in the UK where you could see them.
Today they’re a commonplace. But I mention that story because we’re on Chichester Harbour today. It’s a bay, not a harbour, and evidently (still) quite the place for little egrets. I think I may have posted pictures of this roost before, but it just gets bigger and bigger.
We think somewhere around a hundred birds. Certainly the biggest we’ve seen.
j
Goodness, that was a complicated post on a phone. This is simple: a family of swans.
j
ETA : brutal crop. Click thru for the full image