New Brighton

Pied wagtail 

After a wild and woolly weekend and storms A and B ticked off the worksheet I headed over to New Brighton. It was very unlikely that I'd be experiencing the giddy excitements of the hardy souls who were yesterday ticking off skuas and phalaropes, gannets and Leach's petrels but there might be something lingering about and a walk along the promenade sucking in a lot of sea air would do the pipes a bit of good.

It was a quiet run over. All the small birds were keeping well under cover out of the wind and only a few carrion crows were hardy — or daft — enough to be trotting about out in the open. It was heaving down with rain still when I left home, by the time we reached Hunts Cross the cloud was breaking and the occasional streak of sunlight lit the air.

Herring gulls
It's a good time of year to remind myself there's not a lot of back end to a herring gull.

The tide was high, just starting the ebb when I arrived at the promenade. Herring gulls and starlings strutted about the prom. Out at sea the visibility was surprisingly good. While I couldn't count the blades of grass on the dunes at Crosby I could imagine a Ladybird book illustrator making a good fist of the landscape from here. Herring gulls, cormorants and oystercatchers flew in from across the estuary, more herring gulls headed West towards the emerging Wallasey Beach. An adult yellow-legged gull joined the exodus that way. Having the resident adult on Salford Quays has trained me to spot that big white mirror on the outer primary when it's presented to me.

New Brighton 

Herring gulls and cormorant

The redshanks were in the process of abandoning the pontoons on the marine lake, the turnstones had already skedaddled. A couple of dozen herring gulls were left to doze with a couple of loafing cormorants .

Redshanks 

Redshank and bar-tailed godwit

The beach by Fort Perch was already busy with herring gulls, redshanks and oystercatchers. Turnstones skittered over in ones and twos to join the crowds on the breakwater. A bar-tailed godwit probed the soft mud at the timeline.

Cormorants 

The breakwater at the mouth of the Mersey was stiff with cormorants. Herring gulls, oystercatchers and starlings combed the emerging shoreline. I looked in vain for any of the common gulls I'd expect to be dotted about here.

Herring gulls 

I decided to walk the length of the prom back and get the train from Wallasey Grove Road. It was a nice afternoon and though the wind was strong it was soft and warm and surprisingly fluffy. As the tide retreated more of the beach was given to herring gulls, redshanks black-headed gulls and oystercatchers, a few lesser black-backs and common gulls floated in to join the buffet. As always there was a bewildering range of herring gull plumages, not exclusively dependent on age. Some of the adults had pristine white heads, a small majority were liberally streaked brown, especially about the eyes, some were very heavily streaked about the whole head and neck. A couple of the younger gulls were so heavily streaked it looked like they were wearing grey hoods and I started to ask myself questions about Azores gulls. A startlingly high-contrast first-Winter black-headed gull had me scratching my head for a minute or two.

Looking over to Liverpool Docks

I was spending a lot of the time apologising to carrion crows for interrupting their shell-breaking operations. It was finely judged stuff: if they dropped the shell from a low height it took four or five goes to break open a cockleshell. If they dropped it from higher up the shell would break first time but would be snatched by a gull or another crow. Ten feet up appeared to be the optimum height, the shells broke on the second drop. Further along, beyond the Pierrot, the crows were making tidy work of some huge sand gaper clams that the storms had washed out into the open. 

The argy-bargy amongst the herring gulls on the mudbanks seemed to be about sand gapers and starfish. There was a lot of strutting about in albatross postures as they jostled for whatever one of them had unearthed this time.

Female pied wagtail 

Pied wagtails skittered about the sea wall, more often heard than seen as they ducked in between the rocks and pieces of concrete on the seaward side. I kept hearing rock pipits, too, but was only getting tantalising glimpses of them until I happened to look down one of the flights of steps and found one bathing in the puddle at the base.

Rock pipit

The end of the promenade 

I reached the car park before the revetment and asked myself if I fancied having my skin peeled by the sand blown in from the dunes. Meadow pipits danced over the marram grass as they struggled against the wind. I headed for the station and was fair jiggered when I got there. Still, I'd got a walk in, it felt like the exercise had done some good and the birdwatching wasn't to be sniffed at either.

Home thoughts

Spagers

If I had to have to have best part of a week laid up by the lurgi I'd much rather have it in July when there's the square root of bugger all doing birdwise than the third week in October when the weather's getting interesting. We are where we are, and at least I wasn't tempted to brave the winds and put my fate in the hands of today's non-existent public transport services.

Spadgers

I knew the spadgers were out there somewhere as the feeders have been steadily denuding this past few days. The wind started to ease mid-afternoon and they all emerged, blinking, out of deep cover. It's a smaller flock than I'm used to this time of year, just a dozen birds. They've had a hard Summer and not a lot of incentive to visit, let's see if numbers resume now feeding's resumed. As well as the suet pellets and mealworms I'd put out a couscous with chickpeas and fruit which I ordinarily would have found delicious but couldn't actually swallow without inducing a coughing fit and pebble-dashing the living room. The robins and blackbirds have taken an interest. The blackbirds have also taken the last of the rowan and Pyracantha berries; bang goes my fantasy of late-Winter waxwings but I'm glad the berries got eaten in the end.

Wild, wet weather brings gulls to the school playing field. Time was, a couple of concurrent October storms would have three-figure numbers of gulls, mostly black-headed, dancing for worms. The avian flu pandemic put paid to that, numbers were knocked right back. Today's dozen black-headed gulls and a common gull is an above average appearance these days. I suspect that the hot, dry Summer hasn't done wonders for earthworm productivity on the field and it wasn't a good season for crane flies, either, so the three or four rooks that visit only spend a couple of hours feeding on leatherjackets before moving on.

The annual contemplation of Autumn migration

After three very rough days I'm feeling better though not yet 100%, my nose sounding like the creaking of a windjammer at dock in a Summer breeze and the get up and go being fine in theory but missing in action in practice. I was bored with the cough by Monday night. Correlation is not causation but my first bad cold in years follows my not wearing a mask on public transport for three days because I'd broken the string and the other two were in the wash. I felt it particularly yesterday as I lay in bed looking at the sun streaming through the window. A weekend of overlapping storms lies ahead and I haven't the energy to feel grumpy about it.

I had hoped to get visits to Marshside and Martin Mere in this week. They're both always good Autumn birdwatching, I'll get round to both a.s.a.p. Goose watching is always a feature this time of year and both deliver well. Banks Marsh is also tempting this time of year, I notice Russian white-fronted geese and an American wigeon have been reported today. A Ross' goose at Pilling is a very tempting year tick, I hope it hangs on a while, ditto the spotted sandpiper in a muddy field at Nostell Priory.

The Northern Isles, the Scillies and Flamborough Head have been issuing their traditional firework displays of rare bird sightings. Having seen excellent photos of the chestnut bunting on Unst and the rufous-tailed robin at Flamborough I remain unconvinced I could recognise either in the field. Which is why even though I feel uncomfortable at twitches I will go along to one every so often: someone will put you onto the bird and if you keep your ears as open as your eyes you'll start picking up the necessary ID features. These hotspots are temperamentally as much as logistically beyond me, I don't want to be trapped in a continuous birdwatching ferment though that's precisely the excitement many people are hoping for when they go. Bempton can get very busy but I can make a day trip of it, don't think I wouldn't have been tempted to bob over there looking for leaf warblers.

And of course, this time of year anything can turn up anywhere, and is probably unnoticed and unrecognised when it does. So it's worth double-checking when you see anything not quite. If an American pipit can set up camp just outside Northampton who knows what there might be elsewhere? And there's always that element of luck, too. Locally, someone reported a ring ousel flying over Stretford Meadows. That one passed by isn't astonishing, a thin stream of them passes through the Northwest each Autumn, the visible migration watches on Winter Hill and Woolston Eyes pick them up regularly.  The remarkable thing is the coincidence between a lone bird passing over and a person capable of identifying it being at the right place and happening to look up at the right time in the right direction. Luck plays a huge role in anyone's year list and it's not to be despised.

It's probably a good job I've been laid up this past few days without the energy for envy and despair. Tomorrow is another day, and by all forecasts it's going to be a wet one. A walk over to Cob Kiln Wood defeated me the other day before I even got there, let's see if I can get to the shops.

Leighton Moss

Shoveler

Either I've got a cold or my putting the central heating on a week early has put enough warm dust into the air to turn me into the bubbly snot monster with one of those coughs like a yapping dog. Either way, I decided that the rather ambitious plans for the day would be imprudent. Especially as I'd managed to sleep through the alarm. I got me an old man's explorer ticket and headed North.

It was likely the last nice day of the week. Woodpigeons, corvids and black-headed gulls dotted the fields along the way. The tide was low so the curlews and redshanks on the Kent Estuary at Arnside were scattered and distant. I was sitting on the inland side of the train watching teals erupt from the land drains on the Meathop side of the estuary. A couple of dozen wigeons abandoned the viaduct embankment as the train passed over the Leven.

The train was making good time so I decided to stay on as far as Dalton-in-Furness and wait the eight minutes for the train back to Silverdale. This turned out to be a mistake, we were on slow running after Ulverstone and I missed the train by a couple of minutes. So I stayed on to Barrow, nipped over the road for a butty, bought a hot chocolate at the Station café and watched the red admiral butterflies skittering about the platform as I waited for the next train back. The walk over to the shop for the butty confirmed that yes, I had a cold and yes, I was in no fit state for yomping over the open countryside. I'd have fifty minutes at Leighton Moss, see what I could see and get the train back to Manchester. I have to admit that a lot of me was for not bothering with Leighton Moss.

Sitting on the seaward side of the train I saw a few dozen wigeons, and just the one duck eider, on the Leven. The salt marsh on the other side was littered with geese. A couple of dozen greylags grazed by the estuary, a couple of hundred pink-footed geese grazed on the salt marsh beyond. Little egrets and carrion crows peppered the salt marsh between Kents Bank and Meathop, a dozen shelducks dabbled on the beach at Grange-over-Sands. A redhead goosander drifted past the loafing mallards on the mud bank by Arnside Viaduct.

Robin

House sparrows bustled about Silverdale Station. I walked round to the Leighton Moss visitor centre where three robins were singing at each other in the hedgerows. The feeding stations haven't yet resumed at the Hideout, which didn't stop robins and great tits making it abundantly clear that they were expecting feeding. I apologised profusely, I wasn't in a fit state for punch-ups with hungry passerines. Try as I might I couldn't find sight or sound of marsh tits and didn't have the time or energy for going hunting after them in the wet woodlands. I'll have to come back in a week or so, and also try and connect with the bearded tits on the grit trays.

Pintail 

I spent most of my time at Lilian's Hide, which was busy with coots and ducks. Most of the coots were cruising round the pool in a small raft, a few barged around on the near bank where the ducks were trying to get some sleep. There were equal numbers of mallards and teals though the teals took some finding in the grass. As did the snipe nestled in with them. There were about a dozen each of pintails and gadwalls and just the half dozen shovelers. Moorhens pottered about and I could hear a water rail muttering to itself but couldn't find it.

Pintails

Pintails, shovelers and gadwalls 

Pintail

It was sunny and just warm enough for dragonflies to be zipping about. Most were, almost inevitably, common darters but a couple of migrant hawkers skimmed low over the reeds.

At Lilian's Hide 

A female-type marsh harrier rose from the reeds over by the causeway, looked like it was coming this way then circled back and landed not far from where it started. Another about ten minutes later was a different bird, showing a lot of pale fringes to its wing coverts.

I looked at the time and had to make a decision: catch the Manchester train due in ten minutes or spend a couple of hours pottering about before catching the next. I didn't have a couple of hours' pottering about in me, I called it quits.

Longendale

Bottoms Reservoir 

It's an odd thing: since I refilled the feeders the only small bird I've had in the back garden has been the robin. In fact, I didn't see a house sparrow anywhere all day, which feels decidedly out of kilter.

It was a cool, mostly sunny afternoon and I was in the mood at most for an amble. I got the train into town and the train to Hadfield and had a wander along a bit of the Longendale Trail.

Jackdaws made a racket as they flew about the station, each one sounding like a crowd scene,  and a flock of Canada geese flew low overhead, honking all the way. A couple of robins sang in the trees as I joined the trail, more of them and a couple of blackbirds furtively slipped through the undergrowth as I walked along. I decided I'd walk as far as the seat overlooking Valehouse Reservoir and walk back. Just enough to get a little exercise.

Passing under Padfield Main Road 

It wasn't until after I'd passed under Padfield Main Road that I started to bump into goldfinches and titmice, at first just a few calls in the undergrowth then, as the cuttings receded and the landscape opened out above Bottoms Reservoir a mixed tit flock of long-tailed tits, blue tits, great tits and chaffinches fidgeted through the hedgerow. 

Walking past Bottoms Reservoir 

Out in the fields jackdaws and rooks rummaged about amongst the sheep and a couple of dozen Canada geese grazed on the slopes down to the reservoir. Looking down there I could see a couple of dozen Canada geese on the far bank with a dozen or so black-headed gulls and at least one herring gull, which seemed a bit out of place, I wouldn't expect one up here it's usually lesser black-backs. 

Robin

On the approach to the wooded stretch of the trail above Valehouse Reservoir the mixed tit flock included a couple of goldcrests. There was enough leaf drop from the trees and bushes to see birds flitting about but enough remaining cover to make actually identifying them hard work unless, like the goldcrests and a couple of blue tits, they were so intent on chasing each other they didn't notice me until they nearly flew into me.

Looking over the valley to Valehouse Wood 

About halfway along the reservoir the path emerges from another short cutting and into open ground. It doesn't feel like there's much of a climb on the trail but looking back down onto Bottoms Reservoir makes it apparent. Mallards and lapwings loafed on the bank of Valehouse Reservoir and a couple of dozen mallards cruised about on the water. A buzzard was calling from somewhere but I couldn't see it for the trees ahead on the trail. More chaffinches and goldfinches fidgeted through the trees, a bullfinch wheezed from a stand of alders, and wrens and robins told me to get on my way.

The Longendale Trail 

I'd just got to the point where the trail passes by the dam between Valehouse and Rhodeswood reservoirs when I checked the train times. I could — just — get the next train back if I turned back now, if I carried on to Torside I'd be getting the one an hour later, in the dark. I wasn't convinced I had the legs for Torside today, I might have if I'd started a few hours earlier and made a day's dawdle of it. I'd have been far too late for the Holmfirth bus from Torside, if it still runs, and if it still runs on a Saturday. I didn't take much persuading to call it quits and walk back. The clouds had rolled over so the picturesque end of day landscapes I'd hoped for weren't happening but it had been a very nice walk up and a not unpleasant walk back.

Valehouse Reservoir 

I was nearly back in Hadfield when a chap further up the path shouted over to me: "Can you see them?" I have to admit, when you spend as much time as I do on public transport you get a bit careful about that sort of question but he seemed both rational and sincere so I looked towards where he was pointing. The trees were in the way of whatever them was. It wasn't until I was pretty much up to where he was standing that I could see the three roe deers skylining on a ridge behind the trees. And a very nice end to a walk, too. Thank you sir.

Home thoughts

After last night's biblical rain a sunny day came as a pleasant surprise, the weather forecast hadn't suggested it. A mixed tit flock bounced into the garden, nine long-tailed tits, four blue tits, a robin and a blackcap. There was a lot of investigation of feeders I hadn't topped up yet and at one point the whole flock except the blackcap was sitting in the rose by the living room window staring inside. I took the hint and went shopping. 

The sunflower seeds in the shop were rubbish, I wasn't for paying that for seed the birds would discard from the feeders. I'll have to try elsewhere. In the meantime I bought a big bag of suet pellets and a bag of suet nuggets with mealworms and oddments in them. I usually buy big suet balls for a couple of fat feeders I have in the garden, today I bought the bag of suet nuggets instead to see how they'd go. 

They went. Within twenty minutes. Between them two magpies and a squirrel got the pine cones unjammed from the top of the feeders and scampered off with all the nuggets. They can't do that with the fat balls. They can get the pine cones out of the way but only the squirrel can remove the fat balls and only the top two, further down is too much of a stretch, they can reach but they don't have the leverage to be able to do the vertical pull. I've watched them trying, there's a lot of power to a grey squirrel's haunches, it's just that cramped leverage stops them making off with the lot. I'll go back to buying the fat balls. And I must find some decent sunflower seeds.

Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck 

It was a dark, muggy, overcast day. I let the worst of the rain pass and went to take photographs of mandarin ducks in the gloom. There's something about the cheerful abstraction of the patterns on the drake's plumage that's just right for this weather.

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin ducks

Mandarin ducks 

Mandarin ducks 

There were about fifty black-headed gulls on the pool by the car park together with similar numbers of mallards and coots. An adult mute swan was accompanied by two full-grown cygnets with no sign of her mate. Tufted ducks and moorhens jostled through the crowds and a cormorant and a heron loafed at the tip of the peninsula. There were very few Canada geese about, and just the one domestic greylag. The big white Muscovy duck seemed to be on its own, too.

By the car park

Etherow Country Park 

I walked on. There were dozens of mandarin ducks on the canal, most of them sitting amongst the tree roots under the bank, often in the company of mallards.

River Etherow

As I approached the weir I spotted a dipper preening on a rock in the river, a nice bonus for the afternoon.

Dipper

Dipper

Dipper

Dipper

Keg Wood

I had a bit of a wander into Keg Wood, spending most of my time trying to pick out the runners and riders in a large mixed tit flock working its way through the trees by the wayside. I had it down to a couple of dozen long-tailed tits with a couple of great tits, a nuthatch and a handful of blue tits then the flock moved its way up into the canopy of some ash trees which had already mostly lost their leaves and I realised I had substantially underestimated the number of blue tits — there were more than a dozen and at least half a dozen great tits. The flock was silent, unlike the buzzard circling overhead and the carrion crows debating whether or not to give it a hard time. In the end they left it alone and it drifted across over Ernocroft Wood.

Walking through the beechwood

Jackdaws were making a racket of starting to head to roost as I took the high path through the beechwood back to the car park. Perhaps it's not being quite so hard to avoid the word 'quiet' this week as I'd feared.