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Showing posts from February, 2016
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Winter's beauty One of the best things about living in the Scottish Highlands are the vistas, and winter especially so when mountains, hillsides and fields receive coverings of snow.  Those beautifully crisp days with blue skies enhance those views even more, though in recent days the extremely cold temperatures in the stratosphere have aided in bringing nacreous, or 'polar stratospheric', clouds to our skies.  In pastel rainbow shades, caught on the beams of the rising and setting sun, they are a joy to behold, as you can see below (and these aren't good examples!): Winter's wrath In my last blog I mentioned the advance of Little Auks into the Moray Firth, numbers of which continued to swell as the days of January ticked past.  The severe weather in their wintering grounds off Scandinavia forced their movement, and if you look at a map you can see how much of a funnel the Firth is for seabirds.  What became surprising, however, was how far west into