WINTER MORNING ON THE BEACH

I walked to the beach yesterday. Here in Medulin, the place where I live. It's a small coastal town. It's tourism-oriented and tourism-dependent, so all the entertaining stuff happens in summer. Not surprisingly, even the weather is more entertaining in that period. But ...

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... but the gloomy winter atmosphere has a bit of its own disheartening charm. It's an acquired taste, but if you need a bit of melancholia to spice up your uniformly happy & exuberant life that day after day runs along the axis of positivity, winter in Medulin can be great.

When the summer crowd is gone, not much remains beside the scenery ...

... and a bit of garbage ...

... that can make a seagull happy.

The sky was uniformly cloudy yesterday ...

... the mist was hanging above the shallow water of the bay ...

... and the lantern on the terrace of a seaside restaurant looked like some kind of guard or soldier with an old-fashioned spiked helmet. In the background of the above photograph, you can see a thin line between the mist and the sea. That's a permanent sandbank that changes its appearance depending on tides.

The aquatic birds love that place in autumn and winter, but not so much in summer. During the summer, the bay belongs to the humans. And to a wide variety of colorful objects made mostly of plastic. In the following shot ...

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... you can see the majority of bird species that the bay had to offer yesterday, and those birds are all conveniently frozen together in the same photograph.
A cormorant is drying its plumage. The curlews are exploring the shallows in the hope to find something edible. And then, in the background, you can also see two mallards flying low above the sea.

This seagull was walking along the beach, much closer to the lens of the camera. I had to zoom out to get this photograph.

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Here I zoomed out even more to show you the interesting decorative grass hanging from a flower pot mounted on the wooden fence of the summer terrace across the road from the seaside restaurant.

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Can't tell you when exactly, but I'm pretty sure that it must have happened recently, someone found a bunch of clams on the sandy beach, and left them displayed on the fence.

Here you can see the same scene but from a different angle.

This flower pot was hanging on one of the poles that hold the sunshade above the terrace.

In the corner formed by the top of the pole and the sunshade, a spider has built its web.

It was a relatively large web. Probably abandoned.

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The threads were decorated with dew. In the following photograph ...

... the focus is on the birds again.

A group of mallards was floating in the shallows thirty or forty meters from the sandbank shown earlier in the post.

As I was slowly zooming out ...

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... these birds looked more end more like buoys from a distance.

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This thing that also looked like a buoy, was and still is, indeed a buoy.

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The seagull shown in this set of photographs is exploring the garbage can. Maybe you remember this bird from the beginning of the past.

I took plenty of shots while observing the seagull's activities, and then I created a couple of GIFs with those photographs.

The sparrows were searching for food down on the ground, under the garbage can. In this GIF you can see a small group of sparrows, while in the following one ...

... the focus is on just one of those energetic little birds.

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On the ground, among the grass and other herbaceous plants, the sparrows were nicely hidden and camouflaged, definitively hard to notice, so they look much better in the animated GIFs than frozen in the still photographs. The dull light of that gloomy day wasn't helping to make the scene more interesting either.

That's why I published only one set of four sparrow-themed photographs here and the same number of GIFs.

This is the last one.

Here you can see another portrait of a lantern.

When this photograph was taken, two cormorants were swimming through the scene.

Here you can take another look at the line of birds along the sandbank.

Here you see another seagull-themed GIF.

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In this set of six photographs, the seagull is again the main protagonist.

Here is the right time to say the seagull goodbye ...

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... because the post ends here.

HOPE YOU ENJOYED THE GLOOMY WALK. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.