Buxton

Mandarin duck

It was another bleak sort of day with a keening wind and I didn't feel like doing much. My knee told me it didn't want to go for a walk but I still had the fidgets. In the end I wandered into Manchester and got the train to Buxton, thinking I could just have an hour or so's pottering about to get the wanderlust out of my system.

Between Piccadilly and Buxton the birdlife alternated between jackdaws and woodpigeons with a side-serving of magpies and carrion crows and a lot of lesser black-backs on the roof of the bus depot in Ardwick. The gloomy weather was prompting the jackdaws to gather into pre-roosting groups in trees and on rooftops.

Female tufted duck

Female mandarin duck

Arriving in Buxton a flock of fifty-odd jackdaws passed over the station and a dozen pigeons circled round. I had a wander round the Pavilion Gardens which looked as if they'd been blitzed by the Winter rains. There were dozens of Canada geese and mallards, a few coots, moorhens and tufted ducks and half a dozen mandarins, a few more than last time I visited. Robins, wrens and chaffinches sang in the trees and goldfinches twittered in one of the conifer trees.

Mandarin duck 

Pavilion Garden's 

A bit of a potter about to keep me out of mischief.