Hindley

Great crested grebes, Amberswood

I thought I'd bob over to Amberswood to see if last weekend's scaup was still available to be added to the year list. As a grey morning turned into a bright, sunny lunchtime I got the 132 from the Trafford Centre, got off at Gregory Street and walked down the path into Amberswood from Manchester Road. (I'd wondered about getting off a couple of stops earlier and walking down Liverpool Road for the path straight to the lake but checking it out it's scarcely a shorter walk and not nearly as attractive.)

Gorse, Amberswood

A team of litter pickers were working the wayside to the path and most of the small birds weren't taking a lot of notice so long as they didn't go diving too far into the gorse bushes. Titmice flitted about willy-nilly, families of long-tailed tits bounced about in the alders and goldfinches sang in the treetops. I had no luck with the willow tits today. 

Roebuck with velvet on his antlers, Amberswood

I took the path into the trees that leads on to the Northern end of the lake. I hadn't gone far when I bumped into a pair of roe deer browsing in the scrub between the trees. They didn't take a lot of notice once they'd spotted me, I don't bark and they had the advantage of a couple of rows of trees and a ditch between us.

Amberswood

Reeds, Amberswood

On the lake a pair of great crested grebes rehearsed the preliminaries of their courtship dance, mirroring each other's movements in between performative bouts of preening. They didn't get round to their dance while I was there, sadly. A third grebe, an unattached male, wasn't overly impressed by the romance and took to a lot of aggressive displays, swimming over to them with his neck stretched out just over the water the better to emphasise the dagger bill and getting swiftly repulsed by the pair. In the end he settled for barking at them for five minutes before going to sleep in another corner of the lake (it really was a bark, very similar to the noise that a Brussels terrier makes when it's trying to be patient but will snap at something any minute now).

Moorhen, Amberswood

First-Winter (left) and adult male mallards, Amberswood

There were dozens of black-headed gulls being noisy on the water. A quick scan through found a few common gulls and a couple each of lesser black-backs and herring gulls. There were eight tufted ducks — four pairs — on the lake but it wasn't very often I could see more than two or three of them at a time. One of the females had a prominent white blaze at the base of her bill and this kept distracting me in my search for a scaup. I worked my way through the crowd of gulls and the tufties, scanned the dozen or so mallards loafing with a pair of mute swans by the reeds and watched pairs of coots and moorhens squabbling with each other. 

Amberswood Lake 

I'd pretty much given up on the scaup when I spotted a new dark shape by the reeds on the far side of the lake. It dived almost as soon as I'd spotted it and I would have marked it off as another female tufted duck had it not reemerged a little way along and given me a decent minute's view of a heavy-set diving duck before doing a vanishing act. 

Great crested grebe, Amberswood

I wandered over for a quick look at the pool on Low Hall (I'd spent longer in Amberswood looking for the scaup than I'd planned). There were pairs of teal, Canada geese, mute swans and mallards. A white shape I'd assumed was a black-headed gull as I was walking up turned out to be a shelduck, which seemed particularly out of place on a pond by a woodland. A little egret rummaged around in the far reedbed.

Low Hall 

I'd hoped to get the 559 into Ashton to pick up the bus to Pennington Flash but the mid-afternoon service doesn't run on schooldays (trying to work out whether or not it's half term in one place when it's half term in another is beyond me). I walked down to Platt Bridge to get the bus to Leigh and decided to call it quits for the afternoon and go home.