The River Nith at Dumfries

A nice bright day when I headed out to Dumfries.
The River Nith runs through the town and there are pretty walks along the river bank.
I'd gone hoping to see the Mergansers and if I was lucky the Otters.
There's normally ample free parking alongside the river, you need one of those discs that you alter to say when you arrive and you're allowed to stay for three hours.
On this particular day the 'amusements' were in town, taking up the parking area by the weir.
The river was running high, so no gravel banks or much else to see, not good conditions for seeing otters as there were no river edges.
The 2 Mute Swans came to see if I had any food but quickly lost interest in me when I didn't feed them.
The views are lovely but I was after Mergansers so I headed north along the footpath.
I was on the point of giving up when I spotted a lone female under one of the footbridges.
Then a male came into sight. I took a few photo's then it was off surging up the river at some speed before diving.
If it was fast on top of the water it was super fast under it and I was trying to hurry, with my heavy  tripod et al, to be ahead of it when it surfaced.
Thankfully no one was around to see me lumbering along, the Merganser took notice but in a bemused sort of way, eventually the bird flew off, no way I was going to catch up.

I got a good number of shots and wandered back to the care hoping just some of them would be sharp and the right exposure.

One of these days I'll actually look round Dumfries.

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all photographs used on the blog are copyright of Joan Thirlaway and cannot be used without written permission.