Birchwood

Long-tailed tit

I woke early to the sound of a skein of pink-footed geese flying overhead in a bright, wispy blue sky. The plan for the day was to go over to Martin Mere, see if the Russian pink-footed goose was still about then have a wander about to see what I could find. It had been a long night, I was very tired and getting to Martin Mere is such hard work I don't want to only have a superficial look round so I parked the idea. Tomorrow is another day. It's an odd thing, up to perhaps fifteen years ago all the white-fronted geese I saw in the Northwest, and most of the reports I heard of, were of Greenland white-fronted geese and now they're almost exclusively Russian. I'm too tired to think of the possible causes and effects.

I didn't want to waste the day so I put the roll of carpet I use as a brain to the task of selecting an afternoon walk. It needed to be fairly undemanding and I desperately wanted to avoid Manchester and the school run. Then I dozed off on the cat's sofa (it's my sofa, bought and paid for by me before she was even a twinkle in a tomcat's eye but we're having a territorial dispute).

Anyway, when I woke up I got the train to Birchwood, the idea being to have a teatime walk round Risley Moss.

Birchwood Forest Park 

Leaving the station I turned right and walked down the road to the entrance to Birchwood Forest Park. There was an odd transition, robins were singing in the hedgerows along the road, this part of the park was silent. But not empty, blackbirds were gorging themselves on haws and elderberries and woodpigeons clattered about in the trees.

Blackbird 

About a hundred yards on one of the clumps of hawthorns was busy with both blackbirds and song thrushes. The blackbirds picked off the haws at the end of twigs by blue tit-like acrobatics while the song thrushes treated them like flying insects and snatched them on the wing.

Long-tailed tit

It wasn't long before the first robin started singing and not long after that I bumped into the first mixed tit flock. As far as I could tell this one was all long-tailed tits, blue tits and great tits; another I later bumped into by Birchwood Brook included goldcrests and a nuthatch. Also by the brook was a rather scruffy looking juvenile heron.

I took the path that leads through the trees to Risley Moss. As it crossed the brook I had a look round for any dragonflies — I'd been buzzed by a couple of common darters along the way — and found a grey wagtail instead.

By Risley Moss 

I got to Risley Moss and it was shut. It was just after five o'clock and I forgot that this is one of the fenced-off pieces of our natural heritage that runs on office hours. Presumably it's all packed up and put into a cupboard once the gates are locked, except on Fridays when it's not unpacked at all. It's a minor inconvenience to me but it irks me deeply. What's the point of having a community nature reserve if you can't walk round it at tea time? A community woodland where you'll never be able to listen out for an owl? I can understand the visitor centre having set hours but not the reserve itself. All I could think of was the sketch in the late, great Eddie Braben's "The Show With Ten Legs" where one of the characters asks: "What time's the countryside open, Doctor Bum?"

There was no point in lingering. I checked the train times and I had half an hour to get the one taking me directly home from Birchwood Station and it would roughly take that long to retrace my steps through Birchwood Forest Park. That route's a right-angled dogleg running along the brook then turning and running parallel to the railway line. I decided to go diagonally through Birchwood and in doing so discovered something. Whenever I've gone through Birchwood on the bus the layout's baffled me. Today I learned that it's laid out as a collection of pedestrian rat runs with the roads meandering around them. The most direct route from A to B in Birchwood will be a pedestrian path. Which baffles Google Maps, by the way, you have to be standing a good way away from a road for it to realise you're on a walkway. So I got to the station with ten minutes to spare. And the train was nearly quarter of an hour late. But that was okay, I sat in the sun zoning out the muzak and listening to the jays rattling in the hedgerow on the Liverpool platform.