Mallard

It was a cold night - when I got into the car to drive to the supermarket this morning I had to scrape the ice off the windows of the car, both outside and in. 

I've not been using the car very much recently, and, what with the very wet weather we've been having etc, as soon as put on the air blower to help defrost the front windscreen it promptly blew moist air at the windscreen which then froze onto the glass.  The car thought it was -4C at the time.

So this afternoon, I had a short run out to Chew Valley lake, both for the car's benefit and mine, as I wanted to find something to blip that wasn't a garden bird.  I didn't see anything terribly interesting though, but its always good fun trying to get mallards in flight as they're speedy little devils.

Chew isn't great for interesting birds - there are crested grebes out there etc but it's a big lake and you can't get anywhere near enough to photograph them.  I would have gone down to the Avalon Marshes, but the thought of the recently flooded roads on the Somerset Levels and the potential resulting ice rink was enough to dissuade me.  Sliding off a single lane road into a drainage rhyne would not be good.

[My spell checker doesn't like "drainage rhyne" and wants to change it to drainage "rhino".  Sliding into a rhino would undoubtedly be even worse than sliding into a ditch, what with the rhino's endangered status and my likely resulting endangered status].