Hollingworth Lake

Fox (and rat), Shaw Moss

I'd had a long lunch with a friend in Rochdale, spotting one of the peregrines on the town hall on the way in and a grey wagtail fossicking about with the mallards and farmyard geese on the river walking over to the bus station on the way back.

I checked the buses and decided to get the 458 to have an afternoon's wander round Hollingworth Lake while the weather was looking surprisingly fine.

Hollingworth Lake 

Unsurprisingly the water was very low. I harboured a hope that all that fresh foreshore might have attracted a sandpiper or two but the only waders were the usual crowd of lapwings over on the Rakewood Road end of the lake. There were plenty of mallards about: fifty or so of them were with the Canada geese and mute swans over by the car park, the rest were in groups in the corners, about sixty congregating in the little bay by Queen's Walk and a couple of dozen over by the hide. Quite a few of the drakes were already coming out of eclipse plumage. Try as I might I couldn't turn any of the gulls into anything that weren't black-headed gulls or lesser black-backs.

The trees around the lake were filled with the rustlings of small birds, nearly all of which turned out to be great tits, robins or blackbirds. A couple of chaffinches and dunnocks added variety and a few odd squeaks remained unidentifiable.

Robin, Hollingworth Lake

I took half an hour's diversion up the path that heads towards Shaw Moss. Clouds of swallows twittered overhead while singletons of sand martin and house martin steamed by. The hawthorns on the rise were thick with goldfinches and greenfinches, nearly always obscured by leaves. Every so often they'd rise up, flit over to a fresh clump of trees and disappear again. Wrens and blackbirds were heard but not seen. There was something else deep in the undergrowth but I couldn't place the call and it could well have been another great tit.

Rabbit, Shaw Moss

Woodpigeons shared the field by the path with a family of rabbits. On the other side of the path a fox concluded a successful bit of ratting by one of the farm buildings.

Looking towards Shaw Moss from Hollingworth Lake 

I returned to Hollingworth Lake and bought myself an ice cream just as the sky darkened and the wind started to blow a hooley. By the time I reached the hide it was pouring down, which didn't bother the gulls and lapwings any and just set the mallards a-muttering in the grass. There were a handful of herring gulls amongst the gulls and just the one common gull.

Black-headed gulls and lesser black-backs, Hollingworth Lake

I walked down Rakewood Road in the teeming rain, enjoying the novelty, and got to the bus stop with five minutes to spare for the bus to Littleborough. (Had it not been pouring I'd have walked down to the station.) I had ten minutes to wait for the train back to Manchester, during which time slightly over a hundred jackdaws flew in noisy dribs and drabs out of town to their roosts by Brearley Brook.

Hollingworth Lake from Rakewood Road