I walked around Crail this lunchtime. The snow is looking a little sad in places, but away from the roads there is still a decent covering. Last night was cold for Crail, with the temperature at dawn close to -4 degrees: there wasn’t much of a thaw during daylight. The birds are all still clustered around the shore and in the gardens. The fieldfares were less common today but there were still plenty about. I noticed the redwings more. There were several on the beach at Roome Bay feeding amongst the wrack and pebbles with the turnstones and redshanks.
I walked on through the stubble fields by Pinkerton and Balcomie Caravan Park. The skylarks were in dense clusters wherever the snow had melted in a damp patch or been blown away by the wind. I probably heard a Lapland bunting among them. Bits of the field were unfrozen under the snow and I put up six common snipe as I walked by them. They must be like oases for the snipe in a frozen desert. Unusually there was a flock of 65 pink-footed geese in the northern field. I walked past them about 150 meters away and they barely glanced at me. Pink-footed geese are by and large unmolested around Crail, with no-one shooting them, and they know it. They didn’t look particularly hungry either. Most were preening or roosting. I finished up walking through Denburn. It was full of redwings and blackbirds fossicking among the snowdrops and digging little pits in the snow to get to the leaf litter below. The wrens and robins following on to the exposed ground after the thrushes. They all alarm called and I looked up expecting a sparrowhawk, but instead, a woodcock flying through the canopy, flushed by a sledging child in the sheep field.
Wild Crail 
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