Flixton

Jack Lane

I had a couple of hours' wander around what I'm still not used to calling Wellacre Country Park.

I got off the 256 on Irlam Road and walked down into Wellacre Wood. The trees by the road were full of starlings, the brambles were thick with house sparrows and blackbirds and the robins in the hawthorns were accompanied by a couple of mixed tit flocks, one of which was mostly great tits. I soon found out why all the birdlife was at this end of the woods: a tractor was flailing the hedges over on the other side. I spent the next hour trying, and failing, to avoid it.

This time of year I'd expect a few fieldfares in the horse paddocks but there wasn't so much of a sign of any today. All the woodpigeons were sitting in trees and the only pied wagtail was flying overhead. The hedge flailing probably spooked the lot.

Jack Lane

It's been so dry lately even the rough path to Jack Lane was down to a couple of puddles in the tractor wheel ruts. Luckily there was still enough water on the nature reserve for a couple of teal to be whistling in the reeds. I was trying to spot them when the tractor went by, spooking a snipe which flew up and over beyond the railway line. As I was watching this a Cetti's warbler decided to take exception to me, the first one I've bumped into here.

The mixed tit flock working its way through the wet woodland by the railway embankment included a couple of goldcrests.

Dutton's Pond

Dutton's Pond was fairly quiet, just half a dozen mallards and a couple of moorhens.

I nipped under the railway bridge onto Fly Ash Hill. Yet another mixed tit flock was bouncing round the trees by the bridge. A few yards on I could hear a churring in the undergrowth. I spotted the willow tit at the same time it noticed me. It jumped up into the branch by my head, gave me a hard stare, shouted an expletive I didn't know was in its vocabulary and flew off into the drowned willows.

Walking over the top I got into conversation with one of the dog walkers. "I keep looking for that bloody owl," he told me. "I hear it every night. I've heard it on the golf course. I still haven't seen the bloody thing." So it's not just me then.

I walked down to the mile road. There were a couple of mallards, a moorhen and a drake teal on the river and a few magpies and woodpigeons on the fields. Then off home for a pot of tea.