Enhanced Reality

 Pascoe showed me a phone app which gave an enhanced reality view of the world - extra information about whatever he pointed his phone at.

But I’ve been finding that taking an interest in wildlife has the effect of enhancing my reality.
The other day we walked along the Northumberland coast near Low Newton.

The dunes were more colourful than the Chelsea flower show with bloody cranesbill, burnet rose and cinquefoil.

An area of beach had been cordoned off for ground nesting birds. At first it looked to us empty, the sand broken only by hummocks of maram grass. Yet as we watched, something moved.  Finally, we made out a family of ringed plovers, the parents with their natty, black-banded plumage, the chicks brownish and fluffy yet agile, able to run and hide.
Beneath Dunstanburgh castle, a parabolic cliff magnified the onomatopoeiac cries of the kittiwakes and the cackles of the fulmars nesting there, while a raft of razor bills looked on from the water beneath
Later on, I played the RSPB app birdcalls on my phone and duetted with firstly a sedge warbler and then a reed bunting.

And last of all, the thing that set the crown on the afternoon. Nearly back at the car park, I cast a casual eye over a brackish pond and saw an avocet with its immaculate black and white plumage and its unique upturned bill.  Once nearly extinct in the UK, this was a special sighting.

Really nothing at all had happened to us that day on our eight mile hike, but the wildlife made me feel as if it had been an incredibly eventful day.