A cooler start to the day, with a gusty NE wind making it feel a little more wintry than the warm and wet weather of the last week. A sky of lowering slabs of grey-blue cloud is pierced here and there with shards of bright blue and gold as the sun rises.
Among the drab brown Hawthorn and Blackthorn scrub, rare patches of colour seem all the brighter, including crimson Haws, the bright orange seeds of Stinking Iris, the sulphur-yellow leaves of Bramble, Elm and Hazel with the lovely pink blooms of a Winter Flowering Cherry in the ‘Dell’. Along the Coast Path, Gorse is covered with yellow flowers, with the unusual green-yellow blooms of Mahonia around Sunnydale.
A pink-breasted Bullfinch calls from the scrub overhanging the cliff-face at Caravan Terrace, with Long-tailed Tits, Chiffchaffs and Dunnocks darting among the tangle of Bramble and Old Man’s Beard below the bridge.
An Oystercatcher flaps across Durlston Bay, with a skein of bulky-bodied Brent Geese passing along above a brightening horizon.
Once again, the ledges are busy with Guillemots, spending another night on the cliffs before returning to sea. Shags and Great Black-backed Gull are also on the wing, with a Peregrine Falcon hurtling past me as I descend into the Gully.
In the sheltered, sunny scrub below the Lighthouse Road bridge, at least 6 Goldcrests dart in and out of the tangled vegetation the yellow ‘mohicans’ which give them their name catching the sunshine. These tiny birds, weighing about the same as a two-pence piece can undertake some epic journeys, even crossing the North Sea. This seemed so unlikely that it was once believed that they rode on the back of Woodcocks (a perfectly reasonable explanation!) giving them the name ‘Woodcock Pilots’!
Returning up the lighthouse road, a small mammal (probably a Field Vole from it’s relatively short tail and shaggy fur) scuttles along the tarmac a few yards ahead of me, before diving into a Bramble patch.