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Pavilion Gardens, Buxton

Another day of pouring down. The spadgers came to the bird feeders en masses in the intervals between rain accompanied by a couple of blue tits and the robin. I'm going to have to get a new pole for the feeder by the living room window, rust and rumbustious squirrels have snapped the old one in three. The coal tit tends to slip in when nothing else is about, it seems to be actively avoiding the great tits still. A nod to the windy season was the arrival of a couple of dozen starlings in the trees on the other side of the railway line.

Wednesday

Over on the school playing field there's nearly always a crowd of woodpigeons, today there were nearly fifty. The black-headed gulls are tending to be lunchtime visitors this week, ready for tidying up after school dinner time. Yesterday they were joined by three herring gulls, today three lesser black-backs. Not seen many common gulls lately, perhaps it's the mild weather.

Chapel-en-le-Frith

I decided to go out despite the weather. It's evidently Northern's week for cancellations so that put the mockers on a hastily constructed plan. So instead I dumped the gear and went to get the bus into Manchester and nipped over to Glossop to spend a rainy afternoon on a bus tour of the Peak District getting my bearings for some potential late Spring walks.

Pavilion Gardens, Buxton

I finished up at Buxton at teatime. I had half an hour to wait for the train into Manchester so I had a dawdle round the Pavilion Gardens. Plenty of Canada geese and mallards on the ponds, the Muscovy ducks seem to have had three youngsters and I was accosted by a couple of mandarin ducks under a tree. 

I'll have to have a proper day out tomorrow.