This was my final column of 2021 for the Halifax Courier, part of my "Wildlife Watch" series which appears in the paper roughly every fortnight. I'm looking from my window onto the Rochdale Canal, watching a mallard float amid the ripples. It reminds me how these columns began with my walks from here in Sowerby Bridge along that same canal, taking in the birds, buds, and the coming of spring. The clouds and puddles this December morning are a far cry from the the warm colours of those April days. Paths are streaked in residue of rain, car bonnets veneered in frost. The canal, whose sun-sparkled surface glittered below flowering trees, shivers now, beneath skeletal branches and doomy skies. But recent snows, together with festive birds and berries, remind us that winter heralds beauties of its own. Every day I watch goosanders dot the cold canal, males with heads of polished green, females eagle-eyed with snow-white breasts and ginger tufts. Though year-round residents,