Wet wet wet

I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes. Rain that is. it was pissing down and cold when I headed out this morning. Spent 3 hours 30 min (ish - who's counting?!) walking round Newtonhill getting wetter and wetter and colder and colder. Then when I got home at lunchtime it brightened up and we had a lovely afternoon, compounding the crime by having to interact with the kids in the back garden. Virtually no migrants, though a couple of fine looking male Barn Swallows back at the farm on Cran Hill - I apologised to them for the Aberdeenshire weather. Of mild interest was one of the local White-throated Dippers shimmying across the tideline on the beach, hopping along the wave edges to fed like a Sanderling. Lots of Northern Gannets offshore, about 100 adults and one 2cy bird (unusual?). A female Yellowhammer was gathering nest material on Cran Hill, pulling individual strands of wood fibre like horse-hair from a dead gorse branch - that's going to be one jaggy itchy nest. All the usual dross, and stumbled on a roe buck with two hinds walking bold as brass across cow field - my soggy green army coat made me look and smell like a pile of rotting leaves, so they didn't notice me.

In the recent spirit of sexual deviancy and posting pictures of dead birds on one's blog, I offer this thing. Does anyone want a shot at identifying it? For scale, the tip of my DM is top right.

There's a hole in my DM. Which was strange, cos shortly after I realised that I looked to the sky, where an elephant's eye was looking at me from a bubble gum tree. But all that I knew was the hole in my shoe that was letting in water (letting in water... letting in water).

I guess this is always worth a re-run too.