Mosses

Buzzard, Cadishead Moss

It was a grey, cool but dry day so I had a walk on the Salford mosses, getting the train to Irlam (ten minutes' ride with three of us in the carriage) then walking up Astley Road, then on to Little Woolden Moss and then back to Irlam via Cadishead Moss. I'd made the mistake of praising public transport's efforts in this plague year so my train home was cancelled and I had to get four buses home, the last of which didn't turn up so I had to get as close as possible and walk the last half mile. Despite that it was a good few hours' walking.

Astley Road, Irlam Moss

As usual, the hedgerows on Astley Road were full of chaffinches and small flocks of blue and great tits and there was a robin every fifteen yards or so. Looking over on my left towards Cadishead a pair of male pheasants patrolled the margins of a big field of rough pasture while a family of crows had a good dig around in the middle. Looking over to my right I noticed that one of the small brown lumps a couple of fields away had moved. A few minutes later a couple of heads bobbed up to confirm I was looking at a small covey of grey partridges, five birds in all.

Kestrel and woodpigeon, Irlam Moss

A pair of kestrels sat in one of the trees by the house near the bend and a couple of hundred yards further on a young male kestrel shared a telegraph pole with a woodpigeon, neither of them taking much notice of the other.

The field by the motorway was busy with birds: about eighty starlings, a few dozen woodpigeons, a couple of dozen pigeons and a dozen stock doves. The stock doves took some finding, I saw one of them from a distance as the pigeons and woodpigeons rose and dipped back down onto the field after a buzzard lolloped low overhead but I couldn't see where it went. I finally found it as I got to the barnyard near the motorway, one of a bunch of blue heads with beady eyes poking up from the long grass in the middle distance. A flock of chaffinches rose up and joined a pair of yellowhammers and a mistlethrush in the trees on the motorway embankment. By this stage I was worrying that I hadn't seen a single pied wagtail (I only saw one all day, which is very unusual round here).

Walking up towards Four Lanes End there were a few big flocks of starlings (at any one time they'd be two, four or five flocks and birds flew en masse from one flock into another). At one stage there were about a hundred birds on the telegraph lines and more than two hundred feeding on the field below.

Little Woolden Moss

Little Woolden Moss was very quiet indeed apart from a flock of fieldfares that flew overhead.

There was a model aeroplane meet going on by Little Woolden Hall so I took the path to New Moss Road. It was fairly quiet down the length of the road until just after the motorway bridge. The big field held a few dozen black-headed gulls, a couple of herring gulls and thirteen buzzards, all digging for earthworms. The field on the corner of Woolden Road had a flock of fifty or so fieldfares.

Cadishead Moss

I had a quick shufti round New Moss Wood, adding a couple of jays to the day's tally.

As I got to the railway bridge I noticed a male great spotted woodpecker fly over into a tree by the entrance to the tree nursery. It was immediately followed by a pair of woodpeckers and the two males spent the next five minutes posturing at each other as they bird for the attention of the female, including short bursts of mock drumming on the tree trunks.

Male great spotted woodpeckers (left) vying for the attention of a female