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Yeah, my phone has no optical zoom but I got lucky with that pic.
Normally the egret is very shy and flies away before I can get into phone cam range, but thus time I was just driving out of my gate and he wasn't afraid of me in the car so he just sat there.

It is worth using the digital zoom on your phone cam rather than taking the pic and then cropping it because although digital zoom is essentially just a crop the act of zooming let's the camera know what you are trying to do and the software compensates accordingly.

nice pic. My new phone has a bit of a zoom on it (.5, 1 and 2), so hopefully if I spy any interesting nature when I am out and about, I'll be able to take a better picture than with my previous one.

And what a great excuse to post this pic I took a couple of days ago.

Click to see full-size image.

Incredible isn't it?

I have a small shallow brook that runs past my place. It's about 10 feet wide and in most places somewhere between 6" and 1ft deep. It flows at around walking speed. (I know that because if I throw a twig or something in, it keeps pace with me as I walk along the path.)

I estimated that there would be around three 45 gallon drums worth of water in one of my stride-lengths, that works out at approx 150 gallons of water keeping pace with me, or 150 gallons per second past any given point.

According to my reckoning, (and reckoning isn't my strong point) that's about 12,960,000 gallons per day, just in that lazy little brook.

I can't even begin to guess how much water flows down your river.

https://explore.org/livecams/africam/olifants-river

That is what you call a river in spate.  Can't imagine the volume of water going through.

You would think so wouldn't you Boo.

I found the offending thorn and pulled it out with a pair of pliers. The hole it left was virtually invisible, a tiny pin prick, so I did as you suggest and went with the old hot knife trick. That failed because the sole didn't melt under the hot knife, it just went white and crumbly, like like a perished tire on an old pram.

I scraped the crumbly bit away and re located the hole with some difficulty. Then I tried to force some Gorilla Glue into the tiny opening.

I did a test but as I walked in the mud the boot made a gentle sucking sound, and it wasn't long before I had a wet foot.

I concluded that the thorn hole was too small to get glue into properly so I drilled it out to about 1/16th" and tried again. This time it leaked even worse and when I examined it the glue had actually fallen out.

I read the small print on the glue and it said, "Not suitable for polymer based or oily plastics"

I have a range of glues but they all say the same thing.

I thought about trying a bolt and two large washers but then I decided that if the wellies are £50 a pair and I could average year out of them, it would only cost me £1 per week. Plus if I didn't keep puncturing the same side I could use my spare, thereby cutting the cost down to 50p a week, so that's the way I went.

I'm sure it will even out if I live long enough.

I am sure a man ofyour resourcefulness could find a way to repair your wellies,hot knife,superglue or gorilla tape any good ?

Poppy does occasionally (rarely) pick up a thorn Ralph, but she never actually pushes it into her foot more than a mm or so because she can feel it. She just holds it up so that I can remove it.

I was pleased in a way to hear about your wellie as I feared for poppy's feet as you were telling the story.

I'm sure there's a two left feet gag in there somewhere but it hasn't come to me yet.

I've been piling on the pounds too Tom, I blame the seasonal port and stilton amongst other things - not playing enough golf either.

A couple of months before Christmas I was 13st 8lb so I went on a simple diet. Breakfast of eggs on toast at 8am, packet soup around 2pm and whatever Mrs cooked for dinner. (Or tea, as normal people call it.)

By Christmas I was 12st 10lb, which is fine for me. Any fitter and I'm a serious fanny magnet.

When I got back on the scales in the new year I wasn't surprised to find I had gone back up to 13sr 6lb.

"No problem" I though, "I'll just jump back on the two meals and a soup thing again.

It hasn't happened.