Spike Island

Whooper swan

In the first Covid lockdown I started making a list of days out to places I'd only seen in bird reports with a view to visiting them once things settled down. I've spent the past couple of months catching up with places I know so I thought today I'd explore Spike Island in Widnes, which I was assured is a nice walk. And so it is.

Mute swans and whooper

I walked down from Widnes Station and got the 61 bus to Catalyst, the science museum by Spike Island. I followed the path past the café and found a large herd of mute swans loafing at the end of the old St. Helens Canal. In amongst them was an interloper. The whooper looked like a young bird, there were still some brown shafts on its head feathers. It wasn't remotely fussed about people passing by, being in the middle of a crowd of belligerent mute swans probably gave it a sense of security, though it quietly slipped off into the water any time a dog came by. A juvenile heron on the canal bank didn't look unduly bothered by passers-by either. Coots, mallards, a few Canada geese and a couple of tufties quietly got on with the business of the day.

Juvenile heron

I wandered down the path to the river. There was a little exposed mud at the sides, occupied by lesser black-backs and lapwings. Along the bank of what I shall still refer to as the Lancashire side of the river there were more lesser black-backs and lapwings, together with black-headed gulls and a few herring gulls. A heron and a little egret dozed side by side. There were a lot of house martins and swallows flying about and in the confusion I almost missed a ringed plover as it flew quickly along a grassy bank. A couple of cormorants fished out in the river and a shelduck flew upstream beyond the Gateway Bridge.

Baby coot

I followed the path round to the canal which was busy with three families of coots in close squabbling distance. A couple of almost full-sized young mallards loafed on the bank with a drake that had almost completed its moult into eclipse plumage.

A few common blue damselflies over the water caught my eye then I noticed that some of them were rather a lot big for damselflies. A couple of male emperor dragonflies hawked fast and low over the middle of the canal. I spent a while trying to photograph them, no easy feat given that they were fast and could turn on a sixpence the moment they were in focus. I was a bit luckier with a female that settled on the pondweed to lay her eggs.

Female emperor dragonfly laying eggs

Male emperor dragonfly

It had become a sunny day and it was starting to get busy with people so after completing a circuit I moved on. I toyed with the idea of moving on to Hale Lighthouse for another walk but decided I'd been lucky so far with the hayfever and it might be as well to quit while I was ahead. A nice walk and now I know how easy it is to get there one to bear in mind for the future.