Mosses

Kestrel, Irlam Moss

Seeing as today was scheduled to be hot and sunny I decided to have a morning walk on Irlam Moss. The plan was to walk up Astley Road from Irlam Station, have a look at Little Woolden Moss then either come back down New Moss Road into Irlam or head out for Glazebrook Station.

The hedgerows along Astley Road held a few tit flocks, one of them including a couple of goldcrests and a coal tit. Lots of young adult robins were putting markers down for Winter territories, one of which was given the bum's rush by a pair of adults who flew over the road from feeding in a nettle patch to see off the interloper. A couple of yellowhammers flitted from a hawthorn hedge into a stubble field.

Three male kestrels each kept watch over their field of barley stubble, two of them choosing a telegraph wire as a perch, the third sitting high in a tree.

Across the turf fields near the motorway there was a flock of a couple of dozen lesser black-backs. I was puzzled by the flock of twenty-odd corvids halfway between the gulls and the road. At first I thought they must be rooks but none had white faces. Perhaps it was a flock of juvenile rooks? No, it was a gathering of four or five carrion crow family groups. Why, I don't know, I can't think there was a big enough corpse on the field to get them all in. A raven came in just to add to the mix and was escorted away by three of the crows.

Just over the motorway a freshly-ploughed field held forty-odd lapwings and a few woodpigeons. The approach to Four Lanes End was pretty quiet, just a couple of pied wagtails and a meadow pipit.

Little Woolden Moss was pretty quiet on birds today but absolutely heaving with dragonflies, mostly black darters and common darters with quite a few common hawkers.

Black darters, Little Woolden Moss

Female black darter, Little Woolden Moss

Common darter, Little Woolden Moss

I counted four chiffchaffs in the birches, including a singing male. Odd ones and twos of goldfinch, linnet and meadow pipit flew over. The only bird on the water at the Eastern end of the moss was a full-grown juvenile moorhen.

Over at the Western end the most obvious was the large flock of gulls — black-headed and lesser black-backs — and rooks circling over one of the fields across by Holcombe Lane. A smaller flock — a couple of dozen each of black-headed and lesser black-backs — loafed on a pool in the moss, accompanied by a few pied wagtails. Something set them off and they all flew up, with only the black-headed gulls coming back down to the ground.

I wasn't having any luck finding any waders and had decided there were none to be found when three ringed plovers, two adults and a juvenile, bobbed up from behind one of the bunds. A few minutes later I thought I'd spotted an unusually pale small sandpiper on the mud but it turned out to be a pied wagtail that had lost its tail.

A flock of swallows flew in for a drink. As I was watching them a couple more juvenile pied wagtails flew in. Except one of them wasn't. It was extremely pale grey above with a paler grey crown and pure white below. A definite juvenile white wagtail. I tried to get some photos but the contrast between an almost-white wagtail and an almost black peat bund in strong sunlight meant the results all look like Victorian spirit photos of the late departed.

Black-headed gulls, Little Woolden Moss

I'd been keeping tabs on the train times (there had been some disruption due to an accident on the line early on). The next scheduled train from Glazebrook would have been due in forty minutes, which would have been a push to manage (especially as I'd not walked this route before). As it happened, that was cancelled and replaced by one giving me an hour and twenty minutes, which turned out to be more than plenty. Once i reached Holcombe Lane it was a dead straight walk down. And on the way I found the end of the lane I should have gone down last time when instead I wandered round Cadishead Moss.

By now the early afternoon sun was asserting itself so I decided to call it quits and go and have a cup of tea and finish catching up with yesterday's cricket.