Stretford

Goldfinch, Stretford Meadows

I overslept and heavily so I missed the trains for any of today's planned jaunts and a banging headache didn't put me in the mood for going far. It looked like a nice day so I decided to take my headache for a walk anyway.

It was a warm but heavy sort of a day with a lot of cloud cover. I walked over to Stretford Meadows. Blackbirds and robins sang in gardens, starlings and spadgers had noisy young to feed and woodpigeons canoodled on television aerials.

Too easy

I had no need to hop across the palettes into the meadows, the mud was baked hard. The trees were lively with house sparrows and greenfinches and the songs of blackbirds, wrens, blackcaps and robins. There were chiffchaffs about but only a couple singing.

Looking towards Newcroft Road 

Out on the open meadow amongst the orange tips and small tortoiseshells every bramble patch with an hawthorn and an oak sapling had its singing whitethroat. Goldfinches bounced about the young trees, the linnets and reed buntings were trickier to spot and every hundred yards a pair of magpies would be rummaging in the long grass. 

Stretford Meadows 

Stretford Meadows 

A bramble patch and friends

I know we're supposed to be sniffy about scrub but I'm all in favour of it, partly because it's an excellent habitat in itself but also because it rewilds the spirit, reconnecting it with the natural timescales of environmental change. Left to its own devices this area will become woodland during the course of a human lifetime which to my mind is a satisfying symmetry. And along the way it'll host a wide range of flora and fauna. The brambles aren't in flower yet but judging by the foliage and habit I could recognise there were twenty or thirty different types on the meadows — thank God I'm not a botanist so I wasn't tempted to try and identify them, gulls are bad enough! It seems perverse to grub up a random assortment of brambles to plant cloned whips in the name of biodiversity.

Jackdaw, Stretford Meadows 

A possible lesser whitethroat singing in a distant bramble patch wasn't a good enough identification for a year tick. None of the more accessible patches I visited had one singing though there were plenty more whitethroats with the wrens and robins. Pairs of woodpigeons and pigeons and single stock doves flew overhead, a reversal of the usual trend. A flock of jackdaws rummaged about in the open grass taking food back to hungry mouths in the trees and chimney tops of Urmston Lane.

Walking down the mound

The M60 is very close nearby

Walking beside Kickety Brook 

Dropping down the hill I walked along Kickety Brook to Stretford Ees. Blackbirds, robins, chiffchaffs and great tits sang in the hedgerows. A pair of great tits hunted spiders on the ceiling of the underpass beneath Chester Road, making an already eerie walk-through sound positively creepy.

Bridgewater Canal Aquaduct 

Grey squirrel, Stretford Ees

I bumped into the first ring-necked parakeets as I reached Hawthorn Road and turned onto the footpath beneath the pigeons' nests under the aquaduct.

Stretford Ees

A flock of half a dozen parakeets wheeled around Stretford Ees, not sure whether to sit in the trees by the cemetery or the trees by the tram line. Blackcaps and chiffchaffs in the trees competed for sound with the whitethroats on the ees. Reed buntings and goldfinches bounced about the willows by the pond, a moorhen and its chick relaxed for a while in the sunshine.

Moorhen, Stretford Ees

Moorhen chick, Stretford Ees

The headache hadn't got much better but I'd got some exercise and there was plenty about. I didn't much fancy meeting the after-school rush in Chorlton Ees and looking at the clouds I was reminded that the thunderstorm we'd been forecast yesterday evening hadn't happened so I walked over the football pitches of Turn Moss and waited for the bus home.

Water horsetail, Stretford Ees