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Message: <blockquote data-quote="halftwo" data-source="post: 1641411" data-attributes="member: 45720">First FrostA Tawny owl's ghostly moan at midnight under a bright half moon saw in the first frost of winter. This morning, as the risen sun struck, it blinded: shards of light streaming out west off the white meadow, where the steeple's shadow lay, impossibly long.And into the new day, from sun-facing fences, boiled the steamy breath of warming rhime, rising in columns to soften the blue. The Crow snapped its bill shut in the oak, otherwise mute. Through banks of fog and dazzling light alternating in undulations towards the estuary where eight giant cooling towers formed the only cloud in a glassy sky. Herring gulls and Great black-backs in chevrons headed to the tip.A Kestrel, balancing on a sapling's top, watched the finch flock fly and corkscrew  to alders: small sounds shot through the cracking air: Redpolls, Goldfinches, and with them Tree sparrows. A Yellowhammer, a Reed bunting, a Chaffinch; two Greenfinches and, in the hedge in hiding: Bullfinches.A Sparrowhawk skimmed the hawthorn line and looped over to try the shadowed side. Curlews called. On the Mersey's mud a hundred Lapwing and even more gulls rested. A tailless Mistle thrush was, until it called, another bird entirely; up from berries to treetops with dozens of Fieldfares; while overhead the driiip of a Skylark fell to an earth  now caressed by the winter's low sun - coaxing an unseasonal butterfly  to flit the now-dead flowers.</blockquote>

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