Along My Street
 Photo Album: A Walk Along My Street |
 Photo Album: A Few More Birds |
Whenever the weather is good, I like to walk into town to do my errands. It is about a kilometer (0.6 mile). I always keep my camera in my pocket, because I never know what I might see. I can nearly always see fishing ships, and here is one sailing out of the bay. This morning it returned, and is parked (docked?) just across the bay from me.
I was very surprised one morning to see two women getting out of the bay water in their swimming suits. By the time I got my camera out, one of them had disappeared into the boat house. I was dressed in several layers of wool clothing. The water here is much colder than the Pacific Ocean along the San Francisco coast.
A pony recently moved into one of my neighbor’s yards. I imagine that he is just there temporarily. The horses in the Faroe Islands look very much like Shetland ponies; not too surprising since Shetland is the nearest neighbor to the Faroes.
One morning I watched as some neighbors loaded their boat onto the back of a truck. Since I stood in the freezing rain for 20 minutes with the wind blowing in my face, I decided that I should include the whole series of photos. There should have been one more photo, but I missed it by just a few seconds. After I took these pictures, I spent some time in the library. As I came out, the empty truck was just pulling out of the parking lot by the marina across the street, and I could see a small boat across the bay, too far away for my camera.
I do enjoy watching the birds here, so I am including a few more photos. The tjaldur (oystercatcher) is the national bird. The first time that I visited the Faroe Islands (in 1997), I tried to get a good picture of a tjaldur, but I usually managed to get a picture of an empty field just after they all flew away. Several days ago there was a single tjaldur sitting on a rock in the bay over my fence. He returned with a couple of his friends, so I tried to take his picture through the bare branches of the tree in my yard. The tjaldur has a bright orange beak and bright orange legs. I have seen rocky beaches littered with broken shells where the oystercatchers have dropped the shellfish to crack them open.