Dreich

One of the advantages of my rather erratic sleep patterns is that this time of year I get to hear the progress of the dawn chorus. The downside is days like today when only a couple of blackbirds turn up for roll call and everything else has a lie-in until gone seven o'clock. Just rubbing my nose in it really.

I wasn't disposed to set off early on a birdwatching jaunt in the rain and I couldn't fall back on the old stand-by of getting an old man's explorer ticket and riding the Cumbrian coast as nothing's going North of Lancaster on that line due to the derailment at Grange-over-Sands. It'll be at least three weeks before it's reopened. I might give the bus replacement service a go before then anyway, I won't see much of the coast but the route will go through a few unfamiliar places and I might have my curiosity piqued along the way.

There was a break in the cloud at lunchtime so I thought I'd head over for a walk across the mosses. I was saved by a timely downpour. It was a cold, wet and windy day and I wouldn't have had much fun traipsing round out in the open in it.

I decided instead on a bit of sitting on your backside birdwatching in the Saddleworth area, getting the train out to Greenfield, the 184 bus into Oldham then the 356 to Mossley via Denshaw, Delph, Diggle and Uppermill and the trains home. Like as not I'd largely be seeing jackdaws and woodpigeons but you never know your luck. Except that I knew I wouldn't be seeing an osprey, I saw one fly over as I was on the 356 last Spring and the odds against doing it twice in a row are astronomical. (I didn't.)

On a clear, sunny day the scenery on this circuit is wonderful, on a day like today it was moody and magnificent; a merely dull, overcast day never does it justice.

I got the Huddersfield train from Piccadilly to Greenfield. The pigeons and lesser black-backs of the city centre gave way to magpies and woodpigeons, once we got past Stalybridge it was jackdaws and woodpigeons. I knew we were approaching Oldham town centre when the first pigeons bobbed up on the factory rooftops. On the way back out again the pigeons gave way to magpies and jackdaws on the way through Waterhead and Moorside. 

I reminded myself that Besom Hill Country Park looks like a nice walk and that I really should do that walk between Denshaw and Newhey taking in the Piethorn Valley (or the other way round, I've spent two years dithering about the logistics). 

Coming into Delph from Unfitt I noticed a rookery I hadn't spotted before and pretty active it was, too. This time of year I miss our local rooks, they're too busy to move very far from the huge rookery on the Mersey Valley near Bradley Lane. Going through Delph a pheasant strolling across somebody's front lawn was a tad unexpected. I spotted a much smaller rookery with just a couple of the nests looking occupied as we went through Friezeland. The jackdaws were coming in to roost, increasingly larger groups of them settling into trees as we moved on. By the time I got to Mossley Station to wait for the train back to Piccadilly a flock of seventy-odd of them was clamouring in the trees on Stamford Road.

On the way back I noticed a pair of lesser black-backs nest-building on top of a container round the back of a yard in Openshaw. Most of the nesting gulls in urban Greater Manchester are lesser black-backs and they particularly like industrial estates with their acres of flat roofs and potentially desirable nesting platforms out of the way of foxes and people.

Mossley Station
A nice bit of Millstone Grit and home to a singing wren.

If I ever get old enough for a free bus pass and start to find the walking too much for me I'll spend a lot of my time doing this sort of thing. It gets me out of the house and seeing places and it's interesting to pick out the ebbs and flows of common bird species between different microclimates and environments.