I know I’m clinging to the wreckage a bit, but it does give me a much needed boost to get even a glimpse of better things to come.

The receding snow in the garden has revealed some rather pale and drawn daffodil shoots poking through the soil and the first snowdrops are in bud, waiting to burst open.

The first siskins of the winter turned up at my peanut feeder on Sunday – a sure sign that things are on the move.

Some birds have been encouraged by the lengthening days to try some tentative singing. I have heard dunnock and great tit and a chaffinch had a brief burst one day.

The most bizarre thing I heard was on Sunday while shopping at Tesco in Galashiels. Food shopping to me is one of life’s miseries and my brain was in neutral as I cruised the aisles, when suddenly a sound broke through my semi-conscious state and had me switched back to full alert. It sounded like a robin’s song, and I thought I was hallucinating. But no – there it was again! Scanning the girders below the roof high above the wine shelves I spotted the perpetrator. Yes it was a redbreast, inside the superstore, singing his head off!

After last week’s great response to my appeal for reader’s pictures of wildlife in their gardens during the cold snap, I thought that was the height of it, but this week again I have received a batch of brilliant photographs and have reproduced one of them here and the other at the top of the page.

SS of Blainslie told me: “I had tons of chaffinches, greenfinches and goldfinches come to the feeders, and nine blackbirds enticed by the ground feeder tray I put out on top of the snow. The two nuthatches that grabbed food approximately every five to 10 minutes sadly stayed one step ahead of my aim to photograph them!” Nonetheless his image of a goldfinch on a snow-covered teasel is stunning.

JP from Camptown wrote: “Nuthatches are so quick and I’m pleased with the one with the nut in its mouth taken a fraction of a second before it lifted.

“I can imitate their call reasonably well and within a few minutes, summon the nuthatches from the surrounding woods to my feeding area.”

It certainly paid off, as the lovely portrait at the top of the page shows.