Birds in the snow

As promised we awoke to falling snow and a white world. All morning the snow fell, wet and heavy, until we were getting close to the 20 cm promised by the weather forecast.
Jan worked on her translation all morning and I worked on my pictures on flickr, getting my 2020 pictures into some sort of order.
About 2 o'clock the snow stopped and we went out for a walk. Our part of Sweden seems filled with migrating birds, some arriving here for the summer, others headed for places further north but pausing, queuing, here to wait for better weather before travelling onward.
We watched three curlews snipes (Thanks to other blippers who helped with identification.) from our kitchen window over breakfast. They seemed completely taken with mating behaviour and ignored the snow. Eventually one male, drove the other male off. The successful male then followed the female around, trailing behind her as he gently flapped his wings - look at me, look at me... They are so well camouflaged that normally we probably wouldn't have seen this in the grass, but in the snow they rather stood out as they walked around. Jan blipped these curlews (snipes)
Once out for our walk we saw these cranes standing in a field, and further along and down by the lake there were geese, ducks and swans, mostly dozing on a large ice-floe, safe from predators (extra).
The new snow and dark waters of the stream feeding the lake made for a dramatic image (extra) and the exotic green-coated Jan also stood out rather well against the snow (extra).