Common Nature

It started snowing yesterday, and now there's about 5 cm of snow, an amount that is very rare here. I went for a walk to see the beach, because it looks so cool when it's covered in snow. To my surprise, there was even ice on the water! A fragile crust of little floes had formed and seemed to slow down the movement of the waves as they licked the snow away from the breakwater bit by bit.

At first, I didn't hear any bird calls. I did see a few sanderlings darting around, some big birds (probably black-backed gulls) hovering over the sea, and a huge swarm of smaller birds, but they were all far away. I was about to leave when suddenly an impressive formation of geese appeared in the sky. My birding app identified them as barnacle geese. Then the app recorded some more calls, including one from a dunling, a bird I had never seen or heard before.

The snow and the greyish sky skewed my perspective in interesting ways, so that it looked like there were mountains growing out of the sea near the horizon, or like there was a huge wave rolling towards the beach. It felt surreal and a little eerie.

It snowed today, and I was wondering what the beach would look like covered in snow, so I went for a walk to see it. It was very pretty!

The migratory birds are here now, and some of them spend the winter at the shore. I spent some time watching a flock of sanderlings and turnstones as they were looking for food in the mud. Some crows kept following them around. It looked like the smaller birds were scared of the crows and tried to avoid them. There were many seagulls, too. My birding app even registered the call of a loon! Loons normally live in North America and Iceland, but some of them migrate to Europe during the winter months.