Birdwatch: golden plovers flash across the winter sky

The plumage of these beautiful waders spangles in the icy late afternoon lightA light fall of snow, and our little world is transformed. The birds are, too: their colours somehow heightened by the icy white backdrop.Rosie the red-fox labrador and I take a walk around “the loop”, the three-mile circuit behind our Somerset home. A slender grey wagtail bobs on the edge of a steep-sided rhyne, its lemon and grey plumage reflected in the murky water. We come across a standoff between a pl