Following recent criticism of his failure to carry his camera around at all times, even when he has a bath, the Raptor has sent a bunch of photographs to prove he still has a camera, and can work it with his customary skill. The first is of a flight of some eighty golden plovers which he found in a field above Caim.
Coal tits have been absent from our garden all winter, but the Raptor spotted a pair nesting in a drainage pipe in the old retaining wall of St Comghan's churchyard.
It's an ideal place for them as that side of the churchyard is protected from the wind and faces onto an area of secluded, mature woodland.
The Raptor has been visiting the same shelly beach as we have, which we now know is called
Port Each Beag, which I think means the port of the little horse. The Raptor too has been enjoying collecting its shells, including limpets, tops, mussels, oysters, cowries and scallops, but the prize here is the green thing at top left. This is fairly common in rock pools locally, but not in that colour. Someone has suggested it may be a coral growth, but can anyone confirm this?
The Raptor's favourite must have been the tiny scallop as he sent two pictures of it and took the trouble to measure it - at 15mm long and 8mm wide. It is a truly beautiful colour.
But his best find was this - an old float with some rope trailing from it to which hundreds of goose barnacles had attached themselves before finding themselves washed up at Sanna.
Many thanks to the Raptor for his pictures.
My thoughts of your granddaughters playing a trick on you by placing a blue and a red jelly surreptitiously in your shell photograph earlier are now proved wrong as Rapter has a similar 'confectionery' in his colourful display. Red with white spots to the right of the photograph - could it be part of the carapace of a sea urchin? Perhaps you could enlighten? And I wonder how many years that float has been wending its way about the ocean to grow such a cargo?
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