Home thoughts

I didn't make a conscious decision to take most weekends off from birdwatching, it started as an avoidance of crowd scenes and it sort of settled into a pattern. Days like today don't help break the pattern: all today's weather is good for is sitting in a bus shelter on a wet promenade trying to do a bit of seawatching with the aid of a lot of anti-misting wipes.

It's been quiet in the garden, partly because this is a time of plenty on the railway embankment, partly because the blackbirds and thrushes have had every berry off the rowan tree, and partly because the feeders are nearly empty after the sparrows have eaten me out of house and home. I've been out and bought a big bag of sunflower seeds and two huge pine cones laden with fat and seeds so that should see them and the tit flock through the week.

Lots of things seem early this Autumn but not the Winter starlings. The local breeding flock dispersed to take advantage of the local farmland in mid-August and there have only been odd ones and two floating round since. Ordinarily I'd have expected a dozen or so to have lingered on the school playing field but this year numbers of everything are down on there. It isn't often I'm seeing more than a dozen rooks and gull numbers are low for the time of year. The twenty-two black-headed gulls seem to be a fixture but the larger gulls seem to be mostly passing through. There's usually a couple of common gulls — today there's a couple of adults and a first-Winter — and less than a handful of herring gulls and lesser black-backs. Today it's four herring gulls, yesterday it was three lesser black-backs and a herring gull. This time of year I keep an eye out for yellow-legged gulls, there's usually a thin passage of first- and second-Winter birds through Greater Manchester and if I'm lucky one of them will stop here for an hour or two. The other day I thought I caught sight of an adult but it went and landed on one of the buildings in the middle of the site and you can't go pointing your binoculars at a school.

I'm trying to work out the effect of our moving into "Pandemic Tier 3." Looking at the letter of the regulations and advice it seems that as far as my going birdwatching is concerned it's still business as usual though it would be sensible to be careful about the use of public transport and continue to avoid the rush hour and school kicking-out time. Now the weather's changed and buses are more likely to become badly-ventilated places there'll be a lot more care to be taken whatever tier we sit on.