The beach in October

Autumn has its benefits.

A time of reds, yellows and pinks colouring the butterflies, fungi, and berries... and skies that look as if they've come from a Turner painting.

The tourists have gone and we have our beach back to ourselves. The terns have left on their long migration southwards so we will miss their swooping flights over the bay with the sudden dip to take a fish as neatly as swallow taking an insect on the wing. They really deserve the name sea swallows.

There must be fish, probably mackerel, shoaling off shore. 

We have been visited by a pod of dolphins and the gannets are giving their usual display of high diving as they plummet down like daggers into the waves.

The refraction caused by the change from water to air must mean that the birds have to work out instantly where their target will be as they enter the sea rather than just where it appears to be when they spot it from above....and they do it over and over again.

There was an immature bird fishing among its elders. In its first summer, it hasn't achieved the wonderful white plumage of the adult birds.

I read somewhere that the white feathers of seabirds such as gannets and terns that dive for food is an advantage as it camouflages them against the sky and makes their approach difficult for fish to spot whereas birds that swim down to fish like shags, cormorants and guillemots don't need this and are dark.

It seems to make sense.

On that basis, the dark colouring of the young gannet would make life harder but as a result would make it even more important that it burnish its diving coordination skills which would last throughout its quite long life. Evolution is a subtle process.