Wellacre Country Park

I fancied a low-key dawdle of a walk on a cold and cloudy Sunday afternoon so I got the 256 into Flixton and headed for Wellacre Wood. I managed to time it just right for a quiet walk through the wood as families started to go home for a warm, great tits and blue tits bounced around in the undergrowth, robins and goldfinches sang in the trees and house sparrows bustled about in the brambles. A dozen magpies split their time between feeding in the fields of horses and chasing each other round the treetops.

Wellacre Wood 

Over by the sewage works a hundred or more black-headed gulls fussed about the filtration beds with yet more magpies and a few crows. There weren't many pied wagtails or starlings about today, all of them in the field with forty-odd woodpigeons.

Jack Lane 

I could hear a few moorhens in the reedbeds on Jack Lane but only managed to see one of them. I could only hear the water rail, I was a bit worried that I might bump into a dog walker on the way out and have some explaining to do about the noise. A heron flew in and disappeared into the reeds without a sound, not something that happens very often. 

Dutton's Pond 

A dozen mallards cruised around Dutton's Pond while the moorhens were being unusually furtive, probably a sign of Spring fever.

I kept thinking I could hear siskins in the alders by the railway on Fly Ash Hill but could only see goldfinches, chaffinches and blue tits and in the end I had to conclude I was just kidding myself. The great tits and robins were in full song, some of the goldfinches were having a bit of a practice. I'd heard a pheasant in Wellacre Wood but couldn't pin it down, the pheasant down on Lafferty's Farm obligingly sat on a fencepost in the paddocks.

A quick look at the river found rather a lot of woodpigeons in the hawthorns on the bank then it was me for the 247 bus and off home.