Mersey Valley

Willow tit, Sale Water Park

Up with the dawn and after had a long look at the dawn I decided I wasn't leaving the house anytime before eight o'clock. The plan was to walk down to Sale Water Park to see if the juvenile great northern diver that dropped in late yesterday afternoon was still there.

The pigeons didn't seem to have woken up in Stretford town centre. A dozen black-headed gulls and some pied wagtails foraged round the car parks.

Stretford Ees

By the time I got to Stretford Ees the weather had cheered up considerably. Unfortunately this meant there was a lot of traffic on the footpaths but at least everyone, including most of the cyclists, made an effort at social distancing. There were a couple of small tit flocks, one by the cemetery on Hawthorn Lane and another in the thin bit of woodland by the tram lines.

The river was still in full spate and there wasn't anything on apart from a couple of broken willow branches. Overhead a carrion crow escorted a young male sparrowhawk off the premises.

I got to Sale Water Park and started to worry about how busy it was already. On the Western edge, where the diver had been reported last night, there were people throwing bread to the mallards and Canada geese and people throwing balls into the lake so their dogs could have a frolic amongst the ducks and geese. No sign of a diver, unsurprisingly. About then I got a notification on my 'phone to say the diver had flown off. Bugger.

Sale Water Park

Further out in the water there was a raft of black-headed gulls with a few common gulls and a couple of lesser black-backs. Over on the shore away from the paths a cormorant swam amongst a handful of great-crested grebes. A couple of dabchicks fished in the little reedbed by the path. It started raining.

I walked down towards Broad Ees Dole, pausing every so often to scan the water just in case the diver hadn't flown far and come back. The rain stopped as quickly as it had started and at last I spotted something hopeful: a large, low-slung silhouette in mid water opposite the boathouse. It dived and was back up almost immediately, turning so that I could see the shape of its head. A diver! Goose-sized but low in the water like a grebe, bulkier than a cormorant and with a significantly bigger head and not much of a neck and a big, straight dagger of a bill. A great northern diver! 

I wasn't getting much of a view besides its silhouette so I decided to walk round through Broad Ees Dole to get the sun to one side of us both, keeping an eye on where the bird was in between dodging cyclists and walkers. I stopped at the hide for a couple of minutes to point out a kingfisher to a particularly noisy family. There were also a few gadwall, a heron and five first-Winter dabchicks on the pool. Just after the hide the path had curled enough for me to be able to start seeing some detail of the diver, the big grey bill and extensive smutty grey on the neck confirming it as a great northern and the scaly back suggesting a first-Winter bird. I carried on walking round in the hope that when I got past the willows by the entrance to Broad Ees Dole the light should be right for my trying to get a photo. As I got to the last of the willows something large flew up off the water and away. I hoped it was one of the cormorants. It wasn't. I'd had all the views of a great northern diver I was getting today. The likelihood of the bird returning lessened as the Sunday watersports activities started to kick off so I wandered off in the direction of the café as the sun started shining again.

A prime spot for finding Willow tits

The café was busy so I decided not to get a cup of tea and went to have a look to see what was on the feeders. As luck would have it, a couple of nuthatches and a willow tit were on the bird table, though the nuthatches were more intent on chasing each other off the table than feeding. A few great tits and blue tits joined in, a jay flew over but didn't stop and a robin demonstrated that as far as it was concerned anything with an orange chest was a rival robin and the nuthatches had to beat a hasty retreat.

Blue tit, Sale Water Park

Willow tit, Sale Water Park

It was too busy to linger so I walked through Sale Ees towards Jackson's Boat. By this time the ring-necked parakeets had started to be noisy. I stopped once to check out a mixed tit flock, the rest of the time I was pausing to let cyclists and groups of people pass by (more than once other groups of people or cyclists barged through the space I'd made for the first lot to pass). By the time I had negotiated my way over the bridge at Jackson's Boat I was more than browned off with the crowds and headed over Hardy Farm for Hardy Lane and off home.

A good few hours' birding though it would have been nice to have gotten a photo of the diver. And another reminder, as if 'twere needed, of the inadequacy of our urban green spaces in the event of a lockdown.