Local patch

The garden was very busy with starlings and house sparrows this morning so I nearly missed the goldcrest fussing about in the conifer at the bottom of the garden. I was pleased to see that a pair of goldfinches had finally started using the niger feeder I'd hung up three weeks ago.

There were a few gulls on the school playing field: thirty-nine black-headed gulls and four each of common and herring gulls. Yesterday, after a blustery Sunday night, there were fifty-six black-headed gulls, ten common gulls and four each of herring and lesser black-backed gulls, together with a first Winter yellow-legged gull. The yellow-legged gulls round here are always juveniles and come few and far between in Autumn and Winter, never staying more than a couple of hours.

The highlights of an hour's walk around Lostock Park and Barton Clough in the afternoon mizzle were a flock of twenty-six redwings and a skein of twelve pink-footed geese flying over surprisingly low and quiet.