Hanningfield, for the first time in years.

For a Sunday afternoon change of scene, the Girl suggested that we go to Hanningfield for some good old fashioned duck-watching. We enjoyed it far more than we had expected to. The light was great - low sun, turning everything pink or yellow - and the lake was covered in ducks. I enjoyed it so much that I even forgot feel slightly sick like people usually do when looking at manky aythyathas.

All the Hanningfield usuals were around though waders were thin on the ground, with only a single dunlin left to fly the "we're-considerably-better-than-ducks" flag. The best bird was a female common scoter that the Girl picked up, way out on the lake. Despite the distance, our distinct lack of birding ability and the funny light playing havoc with the colours we were able to confirm the ID as it wingstretched, dove and faffed about, presumably wondering why the sea is suddenly a lot smaller than it remembered. We were pretty chuffed with this - it's almost a reasonably decent find. The woods turned up some bits too, with calling bullfinch and firecrest.

A woman in the centre was unimpressed.

   "Boring out there, today, isn't it?"

   "Well, no actually, we saw more than we'd expected and found a common scoter - pretty good for here!"

   "Oh. But, there's not much to see, is there? We've not seen anything."

   "I don't know, we enjoyed it. Loads of ducks, plus we also had a bullfinch and a firecrest."

Here, I realised that her unimpressedness was possibly scepticism. She regarded us in a manner that was either suspicious or constipated and paused, before saying

   "it's a bit unyooooosual, don't you think, to see a bullfinch, here, no? Hmm?"

I don't think she believed us, about any of it. Well fuck that. Feast your opticals on this masterful photo of the scoter, amazingly blown up to reveal all the details you could ever want:

Interpolation is for losers. Even when blown up to a million percent without any interpolation of any kind the artifacts are still the size of half the birds head. Still, I like it. It's like bird photography meets pixelly game sprites from some 90s RPG game. Now there's a good idea...

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It's been foggy recently. I'm sure you've noticed. In case you hadn't, here are some pictures.

And this was after the fog had lifted some - could hardly see the seawall when it was heaviest.

Fog at Rainham from the Serin Mound.

At Rainham, it stopped me seeing... well, anything, and at home it stopped me seeing the river. Of course, the main downside of fog on the river, at night time, on a high tide, is that ships have to use foghorns so they don't crash into each other. Foghorns are every bit as loud as you'd expect, and then some. Especially at 4am.