Stretford

Juvenile and adult lesser black-backs with black-headed gull. Lostock School

The feathered scamps had emptied the feeders so I went out for a big shop, getting in lots of fat balls, suet blocks, mealworms and suet pellets. The sunflower seeds are, understandably, very expensive at the moment so I'll have to either get a bag of hulled mixed seeds or commit to heavy weeding under the feeders next Summer. Needless to say, their having spent all morning making Oliver Twist faces through the living room window once I replenished the feeders I didn't see a single spadger for hours. The collared doves have been coming in regularly for rowan berries though they'll be having a thin time of it soon as the tree was full of blackbirds this morning.

There's a look of Autumn on the school playing field with thirty-odd black-headed gulls being midday fixtures and a selection of large gulls changing on a daily basis. Today it was a couple of adult lesser black-backs and a couple of youngsters with two adult herring gulls. The numbers of rooks and jackdaws varies according to time of day and what's happening in the school grounds but a dozen of each is pretty typical. Woodpigeon numbers vary a lot: anything between half a dozen and fifty, depending on the weather and the ripeness or not of the berries in neighbouring gardens. I noticed a dozen of them stripping the whitebeam next to the bus stop the other day, including a fluffy youngster not long out of the nest.

I had a late afternoon wander round the local patch, hoping to catch small birds feeding up before going to roost. It was very quiet, only the robins were making much noise, there were a few mutters in the undergrowth from dunnocks, great tits and blackbirds. It was a surprise to see the buzzard perched in the woodpigeons' favourite dead tree. They were all in the rowans and Pyracantha bushes by the old railway line.

Buzzard, Barton Clough

I thought I'd check out the gull roost at Salford Quays to start getting my eye in on gullwatching before the season kicks off in earnest. It started spotting with rain as I got to the bus stop for the 250, it was raining seriously when I got off and started walking down to Wharfside. I hadn't gone far when it started persisting down and the visibility wasn't clever when I got to the waterside and started scanning round. There had been a steady movement of lesser black-backs as the bus passed through Trafford Park, there were a couple of dozen in a raft midwater on the canal. Behind them was a crowd of a couple of hundred or more black-headed gulls with more lesser black-backs and herring gulls lurking round the edges. Aside from a few Canada geese and cormorants bobbing around on the water nearby everything else was unidentifiable in the murk.

I splashed off to the bus stop to get an X50 to the Trafford Centre and thence a bus home. Needless to say the sun came out as we trundled through Trafford Park.