Beachcombing

 It's been a wee while since I posted anything about my other passion - beach combing/cleaning so I thought I'd put this to rights.

 I couldn't believe my luck earlier this month - LOOK! I found my ninth ever sea heart!

this is how I like to see the tide-line looking -- tiny shells and bits of seaweed and no plastic in sight at all. Sadly this is the exception rather than the norm. I just worked out the other day that I have filled over 100 bags of rubbish from the local beaches (so far) this winter/spring - and of course there's still more to be collected...

 This is a buoy I picked up in St. Finan's bay last week -- it has come all the way from America -- with a bit of googling and a lot of help from a commercial fisherman's site on facebook (based in America) I've been able to trace it backwards. It started off life being used on a boat fishing off Massachusetts and then must have got lost somehow and then was re-used by a boat fishing off North Carolina! Somehow it got lost again and ended up on the coast here in Ireland!

I'm still finding little plastic soldiers/cowboys etc...stuff like this makes the back-breaking work of cleaning the rubbish off the beach more interesting.

And finally look at this beautiful bird -- it's a common scoter and I found him over near Rinn Rua the other week - poor thing, he was exhausted and near death... I picked him up and brought him home where he stayed overnight in our old henhouse. I didn't have high hopes for his survival and sadly I was right, he died early the next morning.