Highfield Country Park

Spotted flycatcher 

The overnight rains abated, it was a cool, grey, windy day with intermittent showers that topped up the puddles but hardly wet the pavements. I'd shaken off the effects of going back onto the antihistamines, after spending the past week accumulating the effects of having stopped taking them now Summer's over, so I headed for the Manchester-Stockport border to see if I could add black redstart to the year list 

A black redstart had been reported yesterday on the allotments on the Southern edge of Highfield Country Park, between Levenshulme, Reddish and Heaton Chapel. It was reported again this lunchtime so I changed my plans and got the 150 from the Trafford Centre to Levenshulme Station. Highfield Country Park's been on my to-do list a while so I decided that I'd take the opportunity for a nosy round. I walked down Stockport Road from the station and joined the Fallowfield Loop on Crayfield Road, thence into the country park.

Fallowfield Loop

Highfield Country Park 

It wasn't an extensive exploration, I know I missed the waterfall in the Northwest of the park, but I had a twitch on. The half of the park I did see was very pleasant, nothing spectacularly unusual, just parkland gone to woodland and none the worse for that. Robins ticked in the undergrowth, a mixed tit flock was almost silent. So too, and very unusually, were the magpies fossicking about on the verges of the path. Woodpigeons and carrion crows clattered about in the treetops and I couldn't see where the great spotted woodpecker was calling from.

Nelstrop Road 
Walking down to the allotments 

I got to the allotments and a chap stopped me to ask what everyone had been looking for. I explained that a black redstart had been seen and showed him a picture of one. The allotments looked to have been largely abandoned and now in a process of slowly being recultivated. Consequently there was a lot of cover for a small ground-feeding bird. I slowly walked up and down Nelstrop Road the length of the allotments four times, stopped a couple of times to be asked by passersby what was about. I was having no luck finding a black redstart. A pair of wrens rummaged about in the hedgerows obscuring part of the allotments. A robin had me on a false alarm. Starlings, goldfinches and greenfinches passed overhead, jackdaws and magpies rummaged about in the field by the allotments. But no black redstart.

I kept finding myself being drawn to three likely places, a horse dung heap in a corner by the allotments, some overgrown tyres and oddments of shelves and relics of tables by a fence, and a compost heap. But no redstart. I checked the buses. I was five minutes walk away from the stops for the number seven between Stockport and Ashton-under-Lyne and two minutes away from missing them in either direction and having thirty minutes to wait for the next. I might as well spend twenty or so of them trying to find my quarry. A flurry of pigeons and a rattling of magpies made me look up as a peregrine shot by at rooftop height and headed into the country park.

I was joined by a couple more birdwatchers, a lady and a gent, and we made a concerted effort for the redstart. They'd wandered up the road a bit and I was dawdling after them when something flitted into a hawthorn by my side. And turned out to be a spotted flycatcher. I'd pretty much written those off my year list so I was rather pleased even if it wouldn't let me get a photo of it. I let on to the others and it went missing for five minutes before they found it back where I first saw it. I eventually got photos. 

Spotted flycatcher 

A passing buzzard was ignored by the pigeons and magpies. We were joined by another birdwatcher and the lady found the black redstart. And it immediately disappeared down onto the ground by some old tyres. Black redstarts love the abandoned detritus of human occupation. It then played hide and seek for ten minutes. 

I checked the buses, I'd just missed the bus to Stockport but the Ashton bus was running late so I could get that.  At which point the black redstart bobbed up onto the tyres and started striking poses before moving onto some bits of wood and doing similar. I took a few record shots, congratulated the others and wished them luck then headed for the bus. Which I caught without any problem. 

Black redstart 

Black redstart 

The plan was to connect with the 150 back home from Gorton Shopping Centre, there'd be a ten minute wait. In the event it was a fifty minute wait but I didn't let that take the gloss off a good afternoon's birdwatching.

Wellacre Country Park

Chiffchaff, Jack Lane

I'm occasionally asked why I don't do my birdwatching at dawn, which can be very productive even outside the breeding season with its dawn chorus. The plain fact is that dawn's usually when I'm finally getting to sleep, which is bad enough at Midsummer but this time of year is a dead nuisance. After two nights running where I heard the 0722 train arrive at the station before I dropped off I was all for lolling about drinking too much tea and not doing any housework but eventually I had to admit I'll soon be spending all my time moaning about the weather so I'd best make use of a nice day while it was on offer.

Meanwhile, in the back garden, I'd filled the bird feeders yesterday but only the blue tits and great tits were taking advantage. The house sparrows have been keeping a very low profile, in fact I've hardly seen any of them down our road all week. Perhaps they're keeping out of the way of the turf war between the magpies and parakeets. The magpies are very disgruntled that the parakeets are using their roost tree and are making so much noise about it and are making almost as much noise to show their displeasure.

Wellacre Wood 

I got the 256 into Flixton and walked into Wellacre Wood. Not much was calling attention to itself save the parakeets in the treetops and the robins singing to establish their Winter territories. A mixed tit flock by the school included a dozen great tits.

Normal service resumed as soon as possible 

It was reassuring to see puddles on the paths by the fields even though I'll spend all Winter cursing them. A few goldfinches twittered in the hawthorns, carrion crows and magpies rummaged about in the fields and a robin sang from the hedgerow. The swallows and martins have moved on.

Chiffchaff

A Cetti's warbler sang at the Jack Lane end of the nature reserve. I had to dodge the Southern hawkers patrolling the path and for some reason the big hoverflies found me attractive. The large mixed tit flock in the reedbeds included half a dozen very vocal juvenile chiffchaffs and a blackcap.

Woodpigeon

Dutton's Pond was quiet, I only saw a moorhen and a coot.

Robins sang in the bushes on Green Lane. The mixed tit flock moved quietly through the willows by the path to Carrington Road, the great tits making themselves conspicuous, the blue tits, long-tailed tits and a chiffchaff keeping under cover.

A chiffchaff squeaked and goldfinches twittered in the elderberry bushes by the river on Carrington Road. There was nothing on the river at Flixton Bridge. A quiet end to a pleasant walk.

Wirral

Little stint, Meols

The birding day started with the calls of common scoters on their nocturnal migration in the wee small hours before dawn. It was going to be an okay sort of day weather-wise so I headed out to the Wirral coast to catch up on waders. Little stints — still not on my year list — and curlew sandpipers have been on the beach at Hoylake and Meols all week and yesterday there was a cameo appearance by a Baird's sandpiper. That would have been a lifer for me, I did the research just in case it came back while I was there. You can live in hope.

As I sat on the train I weighed up all the swollen watercourses running through parched landscapes. Even taking into account the heavy run-off over soils baked hard over the Summer there's something seriously amiss in the water retention policies of our environmental management.

Hoylake Lifeboat Station 

It was mild and cloudy and very windy when I got to Hoylake Lifeboat Station. The tide was out but rolling in. There were lots of waders out on the mud beyond the stretch of salt marsh, the redshanks were easy enough to pick out when they flew a few yards onto their next patch of mud. The smaller waders were harder work, it wasn't the distance I was struggling with, it was the wind bashing the binoculars about. It took a good ten minutes to finally get my eye in so I could tell the dunlins from the ringed plovers, and there were plenty of both. I was glad the Baird's sandpiper had beggared off so I wasn't embarrassing myself trying to find it.

Little egret

Pied wagtails and a rock pipit fussed about by the sea wall. Black-headed gulls, herring gulls and a couple of little egrets rummaged about in the marsh. As I walked along the salt marsh receded and the waders on the mud were a little closer and a lot more easy to identify though scale was still an issue. I kept thinking I'd seen a wader small enough to possibly be a little stint then what I'd been looking at would run over to join a group of dunlins exactly the same size. Ironically, when I did actually see a fairly distant little stint I dismissed it as a dunlin until one walked past it. I would have missed a curlew sandpiper had it not been in a small flock flying across my field of vision and the white rump screamed: "Look at me!"

Grey plovers

It got easier as I approached the end of the tennis courts and the salt marsh ended and the waders came in closer. Half a dozen grey plovers, still in black-bellied breeding finery, kept their distance, as did the sanderlings moulting into Winter whites. There weren't many knots about but there were hundreds of ringed plovers. It's been a long time since I've seen so many. And of course there were hundreds of redshanks, tiger-striped youngsters and adults in varying stages of moult, patchworks of rich browns and beiges. There was an assortment of curlews ranging from three-quarter-grown youngsters with shorter, straighter bills to a huge female as big as a herring gull with a bill as long as her body. There was quite a lot of variation in the shades of brown, too, with some of them almost appearing ghostly monochrome in flight. I would have missed the sleeping whimbrel in the mix had two young curlews not barged into it.

I flitted by the chaps with their telescopes using the tennis court wall as a windbreak, so's not to get in their way. There were a few more with telescopes further up the promenade. There had been negative reports of the Baird's sandpiper this morning but don't look don't find. I'd concluded that if it was still about and was with the dunlins I wasn't going to spot it with my binoculars, even if the wind calmed down. I was happy enough having little stint bring the year list to 200, though I'd have been happier if the 200th had been that dotterel and little stint the 201st. I walked down the prom a bit and stap me vittles! there was a juvenile little stint feeding close to the sea wall, entirely unconcerned about passersby.

Little stint

Little stint, showing the white braces of the juvenile plumage

Little stint

Little stint

Little stint

Lesser black-back, great black-backs and herring gull

Herring gulls, lesser black-backs and three great black-backs loafed on mudbanks. Black-headed gulls fussed about and a couple of common gulls fossicked about in the mud in the company of shelducks. I started to see oystercatchers amongst the redshanks and a greenshank scurried about a little creek. More pied wagtails flitted about by the seawall. All in all it was quite busy out there.

Oustercatchers
A variety of stages of moult in the birds at the front: breeding plumage on the left, partial moult beginning centre, coming into Winter plumage on the right. 

Oystercatchers and a redshank

By the time I got to the end of Meols Promenade the tide had started its invasion proper, rushing into the basin by the start of the revetment. Oystercatchers flew in and settled on ever-shrinking islands. Three black-tailed godwits stubbornly carried on feeding until the water finally lifted them off the mud and they flew off inland to the pastures by Park Lane. Turnstones and pied wagtails flew onto the revetment. I kept an eye out for passage migrants, a few swallows sailing with the wind were almost my only haul today.

Black-tailed godwits being obstinate

Oystercatchers

Oystercatchers

Oystercatchers

The groyne 

Turnstones, redshanks, knots and little egrets huddled on the groyne to wait out the incoming high tide while a curlew carried on feeding by the waterside while it could and a cormorant fished for morsels brought in with the tide. A little beyond I found a juvenile white wagtail amongst the pied wagtails. Juvenile white wagtails are tricky and I dare say I've missed loads of them over the years, confusing them with some of the paler pied wagtails. There was no question with this one, pied wagtails don't get down to three, borderline two on the Kodak grey scale.

Redshanks and whimbrel

Curlew

Redshanks, turnstones, little egret and oystercatcher

It was a relief to bob over the top into the relative shelter of Leasowe Common. A few goldfinches and woodpigeons fidgeted about in the trees and robins sang from hawthorn bushes. I'd hoped a warbler or two might be in the trees round the pond but I none were to be found. 

A bit of water on the pond

It was nice to see some water back in the pond even though it was barely a couple of inches. A scan round the paddocks beyond found woodpigeons and carrion crows. A few greenfinches and house sparrows joined the goldfinches in the hedgerows behind the lighthouse.

Whitebeam

Leasowe Common 

Jays screeched in the trees by the caravan park and a loudly begging juvenile buzzard in the treetops was pointedly ignored by the adult circling low over the industrial estate. On Kerr's Field what wasn't woodpigeons was a pied wagtail.

As I waited for the train at Moreton I looked at the bird reports for inspiration for where to go next. The Baird's sandpiper was reported at Meols about the same time I was dropping onto Leasowe Common but couldn't be found again shortly after. One of the guys with the telescopes must have struck lucky. I wasn't for walking back to try my luck. A Leach's petrel had flown by Leasowe Gunsite. I wondered if there were many about. I've had good views of Leach's petrels from the mouth of the Mersey at New Brighton in these weather conditions with the wind blowing birds into the estuary so I headed thataway.

New Brighton Beach

It was high tide at New Brighton and the wind was whipping up huge white horses. Herring gulls, black-headed gulls and a few lesser black-backs floated by. I leant against the seawall and scanned further out. More gulls. Three cormorants flying in a line almost skimming the waves. The dark starling-sized birds flying over towards Seaforth were starlings. There are worse things in this life than seawatching on a sunny Friday teatime.

Herring gull

I walked down to the marine lake where dozens of turnstones and a handful of redshanks roosted on the pontoons. I sat on one of the benches and carried on my seawatching. More herring gulls. A couple of common gulls. A kittiwake, that was a nice find, they're not remotely as common in the Mersey Estuary as they are on the clifftops of the East coast and North Wales. No Leach's petrels though. The tide started to ebb. Waves of turnstones chunnered as they joined the herring gulls on the beach. A rock pipit bounced about the breakwater boulders. Starlings left their roost on Perch Rock and started fossicking about on the receding timeline by the river while more turnstones descended on the breakwaters by Perch Rock and the lighthouse.

Turnstone

Juvenile herring gull

Ironically, for once, a late-running train worked in my favour: I had a leisurely stroll over to platform 10 at Lime Street for the train directly back home instead of the usual mad dash and getting it by the skin of my teeth. 

A canalside walk

Eccles Water Treatment Works 

Even had it not been such a miserable day I would not have been going far on the trains today. As it was, it has been a miserable day and I wondered what to do with it. A couple of glossy ibises had returned to Eccles Water Treatment Works (how mad is that for the start of a sentence?) so I thought I'd try and get better photographs than I'd managed last time.

I got the train to Irlam. There was a plan B: if the trains were playing up I'd get the 25 to the Trafford Centre and walk up that way. Arriving in Irlam there was a twenty minute wait for the 100 which would drop me off at the Salford Community Stadium for the short walk down. There was only four minutes to wait for the 67, though, and it's only ten minutes' extra walk so I got that. It turned out to work in my favour.

I got off the 67 at Newell Avenue and walked down Liverpool Road to the Greenway. A flock of jackdaws was being very skittish, they'd been disturbed by the arrival of a Chinook helicopter at Barton Aerodrome and as it still had its rotors running they weren't for settling.

Salteye Brook

At the corner where Liverpool Road meets the Greenway there's a triangle of a few acres of wild land by Salteye Brook, which runs into the Ship Canal at Barton Lock. There's nothing that can be done with the land so it's been left to run riot and is now pretty heavily wooded. I hadn't realised when passing on the bus just how many of the trees were apple trees, a product of people lobbing apple cores away in passing. The next waxwing Winter we get I'm heading this way. There's not a lot of the brook you can see from the roadside but I had a look just where it passes under the road and accidentally disturbed a kingfisher. The kingfisher didn't have to fly far to find deep cover to hide in. The mallards on the brook couldn't be bothered.

The pavement disappears after the bus stop but there's a wide grass verge, well, grass and Michaelmas daisies and birch saplings, but there's one of those paths that cats and kids know that winds away from the roadside then comes back to the pillars of the motorway flyover and the roadside beyond. So I followed that, disturbing a lot of craneflies in the process and getting a severe ticking off from great tits and robins amongst the hawthorns and elderberries. I had to walk on the road for the last five yards up to the entrance of the water treatment works because the brambles had got a bit boisterous.

Michaelmas daisies 

I walked along the pavement to get a view of the filtration pans and I let on to another birdwatcher who'd also just arrived. Scanning round it was hard to not get distracted by the black-headed gulls and jackdaws milling around. A dozen or so pied wagtails flitted about, I couldn't see any that might be white wagtails. Crows rummaged on the beds with the jackdaws. Half a dozen mallards swam about in one of the tanks. 

It took about five minutes for me to find the ibises but at least this time I was seeing both of them. They were way over on one of the beds by some shipping containers and I had to do some crouching down to get a view that didn't have a big metal bar hiding their top halves. One bird looked like the one I saw last week, flat matt black, the other had a brownish sheen to it without being glossy, a lot like a very young carrion crow. At that distance it would have been easy to dismiss both as crows at a glance and not bother to take a proper look and see they had long necks and legs. That's a lesson for me to add "crows" to the list of birds I take a second and third look at before getting cocky.

Walking over the bridge I looked downstream to Port Salford where a family of mute swans drifted on the water, black-headed gulls bathed and a heron flew from bank to bank.

There's a reason why I only take this footpath about once every twenty years

I decided I was going to walk down Old Barton Road to Barton Bridge, partly to see what birds were about but also for the nostalgia of remembering what Dumplington was like before the Trafford Centre. Usually when I do this I walk down to Dumplington Circle then back up Barton Embankment to join Old Barton Road. It's all roads with pavements and easy enough to walk. I had a yen, though, to keep walking along the canalside so I took the old footpath past the Travelodge and over to the road. I do this walk about once every twenty years and there's a reason why I do it about once every twenty years as basically it's a hundred yards of barging through a bramble patch. This area was the boundary line between the Viking City of York and the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia and as I disengaged savage lengths of bramble from my body parts I could well understand both parties not wanting a fight over it. You have to respect the naked woad-painted warriors who came before them.

Tutsan

There were plenty of black-headed gulls on the canal. The brambles and balsams were teeming with carder bees and craneflies as well as an assortment of micro-moths that were back under cover almost as quickly as they'd dashed out. A great black-back flew downstream, two dislodged white feathers on its wing reminding me very much of the bird I saw on Latchford Locks the other day. As I emerged into the clearing by the small canal maintenance works building a painted lady fluttered about the faded thistles and St. John's worts. 

Manchester Ship Canal 

I walked over to the canalside, the mute swans, mallards, Canada geese and black-headed gulls were all congregated by the grassy bank on the other side, same as last week. A couple of lesser black-backs loafed on the water with black-headed gulls. A mixed tit flock bounced through the bushes on this bank, the blue tits and great tits keeping under cover, the long-tailed tits and chiffchaffs flitting through the twigs, the chiffchaffs squeaking as they went. One of the juveniles was a spectacularly rich shade of olive yellow with almost an orange cast to its underparts but wasn't for having its photograph taken.

Old Barton Road 

The short maintenance road was the more sensible option to reach Old Barton Road so I took it and walked past St. Catherine's Churchyard, with its woodpigeons and magpies, to Barton Bridge then walked over to the Trafford Centre for the bus home. I was wet through and scratched to pieces but it had been a good walk and like I said the other day, I'm still not blasé about glossy ibises.

Journey into mystery

What I'd thought were three parakeets in the trees behind the clinic turned out to be eighteen of the beggars. I'm not fond, and neither were the spadgers when they did a flying visit to the back garden.

I headed for Llandudno, hoping to connect with the dotterel that's been gracing the Great Orme.

It was a thin old time as the train trundled through Chat Moss and Cheshire. A flock of pigeons disturbed from the bridge over the Weaver at Frodsham and a few dozen rooks near Helsby were like oases in the desert. We were a long time at Chester Station waiting for the go-ahead into Wales. We then had to decamp an overcrowded Holyhead train to join another even more badly overcrowded Holyhead train. Luckily, I noticed that the next train straight to Llandudno was also stuck at the station so I walked over and got that. It, too, wasn't getting anywhere but had seats free to sit on. For a while. Otherwise I was for giving up. Fifteen minutes later we were told to decamp and get the train I came in on. Half an hour after that I gave up and got the train back to Manchester. It would have been teatime before I arrived anywhere. I hear there are places in the world where travel by public transport isn't an unpredictable adventure with no guarantee of success, how tiresome for them.

I could and should have waited for a train stopping at Frodsham so I could retrieve something of the day but as they were all stuck in Wales it wasn't really an option.

The clouds rolled in after a bright, sunny morning. It was thin pickings on the way home but a flock of black-headed gulls on a playing field in Dallam brought some light into the gloom.

All in all a crap start to the month. Still, what can we expect? After more than forty years of active disinvestment in national infrastructure so the bookies' runners in the city can extract the investment capital and cache it offshore the waterways will be full of shit and the trains won't run on time. Then we'll be told by the powers that be that it's all the fault of poor people trying to escape the wars and environmental disasters our governments have contributed so much towards, them poor devils will be to blame for the rich lads' asset-stripping and nothing working anymore. It makes me cross.

Summer drapery 2026

Looking down the Medlock Valley 

It would be nice to have an extended happy medium somewhere between Coo, What A Scorcher! and Britain Shivers! The prolonged dry spell and a succession of heatwaves had their impact on the landscapes. It also had an impact on which landscapes I explored: heat and wildfires knocked a lot of hillwalking on the head.

Whatever the weather, and the changing climate, the scenery is worth the effort of the visit, most of the time. Don't think I've never been tempted to put together a sewage works gallery.

New Cut, Woolston

River Irwell, Kersal Wetlands 

Crosby Marine Lake 

River Irwell, Kersal Dale 

River Mersey, Urmston

Chat Moss 

Welsh Coast Path approaching Foryd Bay 

Caernarfon 

Lower Strinesdale Reservoir 

River Mersey, Woolston 

Low Hall 

Bempton Cliffs

A Stretford Meadows sunset 

Grange-over-sands Station 

Duddon Estuary

Hodbarrow, Black Combe in the distance

Tarlscough Lane, Burscough 

Wellacre Country Park
No, it didn't rain.

Moses Gate Country Park 

Pennington Flash 

Buxton Pavilion Gardens 

Chat Moss

Rixton

Dee Estuary, West Kirby 

Partial solar eclipse, Banky Lane 

Cadishead Moss

Pennington Flash 

Cob Kiln Wood 

Lostock Park 

High Rid Reservoir 

Walkerwood Reservoir 

Woolston Eyes 

Manchester Ship Canal by Wharfside