Mersey Valley

Heron, by Chorlton Golf Course

I got the bus over to Merseybank and had an afternoon walk from Chorlton Water Park back to Stretford.

Chorlton Water Park

Chorlton Water Park was fairly quiet of people (by its standards). A couple of squadrons of Canada geese patrolled the lake, studiously ignored by fifty-odd coots, a couple of dozen mallards and a couple of families of mute swans with fully grown cygnets. The cygnets were almost the noisiest birds there, the crown going to a pair of almost fully grown great crested grebes that were very insistent that they should still be being fed by their parents. 

The small birds in the trees were frustrating even by July standards: contact calls from deep cover, dark shapes flitting through the undergrowth and great tits singing filthy songs from lamp standards (I might be making that last one up for dramatic effect).

I had a wander round Barlow Tip for quarter of an hour, thrusting my way through the rain-battered thistles like the cat through the bedroom curtains. It was a dead waste of time, all that effort for a couple of woodpigeons and a carrion crow.

The walk along the river was more productive. Overhead, woodpigeons commuted between golf courses. Goldfinches, blue tits and great tits called and occasionally showed themselves in the hedgerow by Barlow Tip. Out on the river a male grey wagtail foraged near the electricity substation and a very downy youngster fossicked round near the sluice by the golf course.  Half a dozen mallard loafed and bathed along the far bank, keeping eyes and ears open for any dogs passing too close for comfort. I scanned through the larch trees for finches or titmice and found a heron.

Ring-necked parakeet, Jackson's Boat

At Jackson's Boat I spent a few minutes trying in vain to see where a couple of chaffinches were calling from by the tram bridge and in the process found a family of blackcaps feeding in a hawthorn bush. The ring-necked parakeets were phenomenally noisy and frustratingly well-camouflaged in the trees. When they're flying about they're outrageously colourful but as soon as they land in the canopy they blend in surprisingly well.

Jackson's Boat

I walked through Sale Ees, which was very quiet. Sale Water Park was busier, almost entirely with coots, mute swans and black-headed gulls. The Canada geese all seemed to be on Broad Ees Dole with a dozen herons and a couple of moorhens.

Broad Ees Dole

Stretford Ees wasn't a right lot busier than Barlow Tip or Sale Ees. I'd been wondering where all the hirundines and swifts were, it was the sort of weather where you'd expect them to be buzzing the waterways en masse and aside from a swallow that flew upriver from Jackson's Boat there'd been none. It turned out they were busy hawking low over the trees in the cemetery. A disturbing thought for a gloomy Friday.