Stretford

Kestrel, Stretford Meadows

After another windy night it was a milder and calmer sort of day and the garden was full of feathered hooligans making heavy inroads on the sunflower seeds again. The robin's not been much in evidence lately, though, possibly it's the one keeping itself busy in the rambling rose by the station.

The usual bunch of black-headed gulls were on the school playing field with a couple of common gulls and lesser black-backs. The sole herring gull puzzled me, partly because it was a small female in second-Winter plumage (a plumage I'm always a bit iffy with) but mostly because the angle of view made it look even smaller than it was.

I decided I needed to bounce myself out of my torpor and set out for an afternoon's stroll round Stretford Meadows.

There was the usual crowd of spadgers in the hedgerow by the garden centre on Newcroft Road. A couple of redwings mixed with the blackbirds in the trees by the car park and a flock of blue tits and great tits moved quietly through the undergrowth. A buzzard floated low overhead and headed over the motorway.

The path not walked

I joined the bridleway and decided not to take the main path onto the meadows. The circuitous route I took to join the main path was rough but a bit drier. True to form, the main path got wetter the higher up I walked.

Stretford Meadows

There were plenty of magpies about and there was a steady overhead flow of woodpigeons and pigeons. It came as a relief to see that the pair of kestrels was still around though I doubt the female was happy to have one of the carrion crows spend so much time harassing it. The robins flitted about in the hawthorn bushes and a greenfinch flew over but the wrens and reed buntings kept undercover. I was struck by the complete absence of meadow pipits.

Stretford Meadows

I decided not to take the steep descent back down to the bridleway, instead going the long way on the path that skirts round the Northern margins. This took me through the trees by the houses, which were full of a mixed tit flock — blue, great and long-tailed — goldfinches, a pair of bullfinches and a jay. A gang of a dozen magpies bounced around between the trees and the bushes on the meadow and a handful of parakeets screeched in the treetops.

Stretford Meadows

I walked down along Kickety Brook to Stretford Ees as the sun started setting. A mixed tit flock included a treecreeper which foraged close by the path but disappeared any time I got the camera focussed on it.

I emerged from under the arches of the aquaduct to bump into yet another mixed tit flock. I'd barely walked more than a couple of yards when the long-tailed tits started to make a hullabaloo because a kestrel had decided to come in and settle to roost by the tram line.

Stretford Ees looking over to Sale Water Park

There had been a steady stream of jackdaws and carrion crows overhead heading for roost. More jackdaws poured in in the twilight, heading for their roosts on Turn Moss and Sale Water Park. As I walked down Hawthorn Lane on Turn Moss there was upward of two hundred jackdaws in the trees. Given that any single jackdaw can sound like a crowd scene you can imagine the noise, punctuated only by the screeches of a dozen parakeets as they wheeled round in formation overhead before heading off to their roost on Chorlton Ees.

I'd spent three hours toddling round and I didn't much fancy negotiating the muddy tracks of Ivy Green and Chorlton Ees in the dark so I headed off into Chorlton for what turned out to be a long wait for a bus home.