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| Collared dove |
It was an unscheduled bright, if cool, Spring day and I didn't have the energy to do a right lot with it. I had planned on doing the trip out I'd postponed yesterday but couldn't rattle myself into action and it came as a relief to see no reports suggesting that the Iberian wagtail which made an appearance at Elton Reservoir yesterday afternoon stayed around overnight so I wasn't tempted to hare off in that direction either.
There's bad news on the public transport front with Little Gem packing in as from today, meaning that a lot of the odd little bus routes in Greater Manchester will be put on ice for at least a week or two. The only remaining local bus into Urmston is one of the ones affected but will get emergency cover of some sort. Ashton-on-Mersey is particularly badly hit, all of the bus services I use from there are suspended. We'll just have to see what happens when the dust settles.
The spadgers have stripped the larder bare so I've had to go and do a big bird food shop. I'd meant to do it the other day but there's a limit to how much I can carry these days and I still had a bag of mealworms to tide them over. I've endured a lot of accusatory stares from the feathered hooligans but I reckon there's a new generation of aphids in the garden now all the roses and currant bushes are in full leaf and they can be getting cracking in there.
The blackbird which had been singing nearly 24 x 7 last week has run out of steam and is only doing the dusk chorus. I suspect he's busy, the female hasn't been seen at all this week and is probably sitting on a nest somewhere. The sparrows and starlings have active nests in neighbours' eaves, the starlings putting in full days' work digging up leatherjackets from the school playing field. The wren is singing for most of the mornings, protecting a territory along the ivies on next door's garden fence (and mine at the bottom of the garden where it's spread through). And the chaffinch is still singing, too, though he's only doing the lunchtime shift. I've been sleeping through and haven't caught any of the dawn choruses lately so I don't know how that's faring.
Over on the school playing field gulls are a distant memory save for the occasional fly-by herring gull or lesser black-back. The only time there aren't double-digit numbers of magpies and woodpigeons on there is when a games session is in play and teams are spread out over the whole field. Otherwise there could be a football kickaround going on and thirty woodpigeons stubbornly feeding beyond the goalposts.
I'd been fretting about the year list so I looked up last year's records for comparison. The key reason why last year's tally up to mid-April is a dozen up on this year is down to Spring migration being later this year. Last year a lot of our Summer migrants had arrived by the end of March, then there was a couple of weeks' lull due to bad weather in Spain then a mad rush at the end of April. This year not many of them arrived before the end of March and the alternating warm and cold snaps in March and April seems to put a lot of the migration back a week or two.
| Summer migrant | First seen 2022 | First seen 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Garden warbler | 21/04/22 | Not yet |
| Garganey | 21/03/22 | Not yet |
| House martin | 14/04/22 | 13/04/23 |
| Little ringed plover | 24/03/22 | Not yet |
| Reed warbler | 16/04/22 | 13/04/23 |
| Sand martin | 31/03/22 | 20/03/23 |
| Sandwich tern | 14/04/22 | Not yet |
| Sedge warbler | 26/04/22 | Not yet |
| Swallow | 31/03/22 | 13/04/23 |
| Swift | 09/05/22 | Not yet |
| Wheatear | 11/04/22 | 17/04/22 |
| Whinchat | 28/03/22 | Not yet |
| Whitethroat | 28/03/22 | 20/04/23 |
| Willow warbler | 24/03/22 | 01/04/23 |
| Yellow wagtail | 28/03/22 | Not yet |
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