Forest Spirit?

Some days are just awesomely beautiful. The trees full of snow. The sun shining out of a blue sky. The air crisp and dry and perfectly cold. You want to cry out at the beauty as you walk through this day and see more beauty with every curve you round.  On such a day you take 51 photographs and it's really hard to choose a blip!
As we walked I noticed this shape in the trees. Out of the corner of my eye it looked like a strange creature, perhaps a twisted old man. It's been there, unseen, on many walks through the years, but just today the light caught it and it became visible. As I took the picture on the way home Jan mentioned it had also caught her eye on the way down to the lake.
The name Thor popped into my mind. Living near the forest it is easy to understand animist beliefs and religions filled with spirits, small gods, angels etc.
The birds also provided a worthy blip today, as you can see in the extra. Large flocks of birds have been roosting nearby for weeks, flitting back and forth every day in a slightly hysterical fashion. Today part of one flock landed in the tree by our kitchen and we were able to see they were fieldfares. In the evening another flock settled to roost by our rubbish bins and I could see and hear they were waxwings.  Both these species would be normally be a long way south by now, gone from this area in mid-November as the food supply came to an end. But in this year of so many rowan berries they have had no need to go further south and are still gorging themselves on the bumper harvest. Surely they'll depart soon. They have to sleep through a 17 hour freezing night and then eat enough in 7 hours to keep themselves going through another night. No wonder they feed hysterically.
As you see, I chose two pictures from the 51 for Blipfoto. These two, plus a further 11 pictures are now on my flickr page and can be seen here.