Etherow Country Park

Keg Wood 

It was the first properly November day of the month, a misty day full of dismal twilight. Both ideas for today's birdwatching required a degree of fair light so I postponed them and spent the morning catching up with a bit of domestic stuff including refilling the feeders in the back garden for the umpteenth time this week. I'm not sure whether to blame the spadgers or the coal tits which are spending more time stocking up their hoards than actual feeding.

I bobbed over to Etherow Country Park to have a look at the mandarins and for once was out of luck: it was so gloomy an afternoon they'd gone to bed. They roost in the trees somewhere out of sight in the deeper recesses of Keg Wood. There were plenty of mallards and Canada geese and half a dozen tufted ducks were harbingers of Winter to come. The robins were practising looking winsome for the passing trade while dunnocks and blackbirds seemed to be everywhere. Two pairs of carrion crows were setting up territories, cawing furiously at each other across the river. The pair in Ernocroft Wood flew over, cawed performatively atop a beech tree then floated back over before their outraged antagonists could chase them off.

Etherow Country Park 

I lingered in Keg Wood until sunset, hoping for owls or woodcocks or sundry creatures of the night while robins, great tits and wrens objected loudly to my passing by. I'd given up and was most of the way back, picking my way gingerly over wet leaves in the twilight, when I was rewarded by the "whoo-ooo" of a male tawny owl. It echoed across the trees from somewhere near Keg Pool. I didn't bother going back to try and see the bird, my night vision's not what it was and there's no way I'd be tackling that slope in the dark. I could still hear the owl in the distance as I walked through Etherow Country Park and on for the 384 back to Stockport.

Walking back down into Etherow Country Park