Etherow Country Park

Drake mandarin duck in eclipse plumage

The morning started with thirty-odd spadgers in the garden with a couple of blue tits and one of the great tits. Me and the cat went back to bed and left them to it for an hour. 

I decided to get a bit of exercise with a teatime walk round Etherow Country Park, the idea being that it might be a bit quieter as people would be going home for their teas. What I hadn't anticipated was a music festival going on in the field behind the weir. Ah well.

Fifty-odd black-headed gulls hung around the car park with the pigeons and Canada geese. Optimistic as ever I checked to make sure there wasn't anything more exotic amongst them.

Drake mandarin

The mandarin ducks, like the mallards, are in full eclipse plumage at the moment. The only clue you get that you're looking at a drake is the slightly browner plumage and a red bill, though a couple were already showing a flash of orange as the "sail" feathers were starting to come through.

Dipper

The grey wagtails on the river have had a successful year, the youngsters were flitting about so much between the river and the weir I couldn't be sure if there were two or three of them. I was trying to work out if a wagtail landing on a rock in the river was one of the ones I'd just been watching on the weir when a dipper popped up and started foraging round a couple of big blocks. It went round the back of one of the blocks and disappeared. All I saw of it after that was the occasional splash of water as it bobbed up for a breath of air before immediately going back to feed on the river bed. 

Mandarin ducks

I got to Keg Wood and decided against spending an hour wandering round: between the humidity and the music festival I didn't feel it would have been much fun.

Etherow Country Park canal

More of the same on the walk back down to the car park with the addition of a cormorant in the dead tree on the island in the lake and a Canada x greylag cross amongst the Canada geese on the little canal by the garden centre.

Cormorant

I got the buses back. Walking home a family of seven swifts screeched their way round the rooftops. Enjoy them while we can.