No, not a negative of a positive and absolutely no photoshop involved. This was taken at altitude in thick, low cloud on 15th January in Herefordshire where Tess and I spent about five hours doing ranger stuff and practising SAR thingummies.

With the snow beginning to thaw right across the South and South-West of the UK and heavy rain forecast for the next day or two, I felt we needed to find a location where the snow was still fairly pristine and thick on the ground in order to get at least one more day of practise and that meant finding a decent-sized hill to climb.

Anyway, it was a good day in the end, although quite tiring and oddly macabre due to the absolute stillness of the air and the much-reduced visibility. Nothing appeared to move at all and even the sound of my own footfalls seemed muffled in a spooky kind of way, but then I heard what I immediately recognised as the unmistakeable twittering flight-call of a Swallow! I called for Tess to stay still and listened disbelievingly for a good thirty seconds or more….and then I spied the bird itself, but it wasn’t a Swallow at all, but a solitary Starling standing on a fence post almost thirty metres away and just about visible through the steadily thickening cloud.

Starlings, of course, are wonderful mimics and excel at imitating the sounds made by almost anything from car alarms, electric drills and mobile phone ring-tones to the calls and songs of almost any species of bird you care to mention. Anyway, despite feeling slightly disappointed that it wasn’t actually a very early (or indeed, a very late) itinerant Swallow, the incident did go some way towards proving that Starlings must surely have a reasonably  good long-term memory, one that enables them to continue imitating the call of a bird species that left our shores for sunnier climes at least five months ago….Unless that is, the Starling somehow managed to hear a Swallow calling on the wing far more recently than that somewhere!