After yesterday's soaking I took today off to give my poor old joints and poor new boots a chance to recuperate. It's good to know the boots are properly waterproof though it would have been more comfortable not to confirm it by their collection of rainwater trickling down legs and wicking through socks.
I'm currently dramatically undercounting the spadgers in the garden as they're spending most of their time hidden in the sycamores gleaning aphids and only coming in to the feeders in ones and twos and not for very long. I go whole days without seeing any titmice at all.
Over on the school playing field it's rare to see less than a dozen magpies feeding on the grass and uncommon not to see at least a couple of dozen woodpigeons. A few lesser black-backs drift in for the lunchtime clean-up, they nest on industrial rooftops in Trafford Park.
One of the things that struck me yesterday is that I will blithely spend the best part of four hours getting to a site in Merseyside but baulk at the idea of spending four or five hours getting to sites in the Northeast or Scotland. In the time it takes me to get to West Kirby or Lunt Meadows I could be most of the way to seeing two very rare species of scoter in Fife or a grey-headed lapwing in Northumberland. The reasons are twofold. The first is that I know the areas and have a selection of back-ups for when things go wrong, either alternative travel arrangements or alternative sites I know I can visit if I decide to give up completely. There are too many single points of failure in travelling to Scotland and the Northeast and all of them rely on the two most unreliable train operators, Avanti and Transpennine Express. The other factor, of course, is the cost: the price of a visit to a site in Merseyside is 20% - 25% the price of the journey North, even with advance booking and split-ticketing and the like. Which is why I tend to stick to the Northwest region. I wonder if birdwatchers elsewhere in the country have similar issues.
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