Drab

The day began dull and dreary, but was forecast to improve, so I talked myself out of a trip to Otmoor on the grounds of its tiny car park/ possible starling murmuration/ probable murmuration viewing hordes/ inevitably awful Oxford Friday evening traffic, and spent the morning doing boring things at home while I waited for the Shire to brighten up. The improvement never arrived, and by late lunch time the Met Office app was behaving as though there had never been any chance of it  - certainly they'd never suggested such a thing - and no-one but a loser would have given up the chance of spending a sunny afternoon in Oxfordshire in favour of staying put in the miserable West Midlands.

I wasn't best pleased, to put it mildly.

I stomped off outside and searched the garden for a macro subject, and managed to find a couple of roosting weevils, plus some kind of fungussy, slime mouldy, invertebrate eggy kind of stuff inside a rotting branch, which looked potentially interesting... but there wasn't enough light to photograph small things in dark corners, and I found that I couldn't be bothered to go and fetch the flash unit. At which point I realised that I needed to go out. Somewhere. Anywhere. So I got in the car and went to Hillers, on the grounds that there was almost bound to be something there, even if it was only a cup of coffee.

In the event I captured a few nice things from the bird hide, including a pair of muntjac, a juvenile squirrel eating an apple, and a treecreeper shot that was tantalisingly close to being acceptable. But R has picked this portrait of a dunnock on the edge of the bird table because he likes the simplicity of it, and at these close quarters he finds the plumage of this unassuming and often overlooked bird rather attractive. Some people describe the dunnock as an LBJ ("little brown job"), and obviously find it boring, but I agree with R that it's a handsome little creature, and while there were definitely some drab elements to my day today - notably Worcestershire, its weather, and my mood - I'm happy to assert that the dunnock wasn't one of them.