Irlam Locks

Female house sparrow, Irlam Locks 

I was a lot low energy today after only getting to sleep some time after four so I knocked the ambitious plans for today on the head. Additionally the black dog's been biting this week, it does this time of year, and I decided I really couldn't be bothered. The garden was full of mixed tit flock and spadgers, I need to refill those feeders tomorrow.

It was a leaden grey sky but a mild, dry day so I decided I should get some exercise anyway so I got the 256 down to Town Gate and had a dawdle round Irlam Locks to see if anything was about.

Juvenile house sparrow, Irlam Locks 

The spadgers on Irlam Road were busy gleaning the last of the aphids from the sycamores in the hedgerows while dunnocks, wrens and robins rummaged about in the hawthorns. Overhead a harbinger of Winter's starling flocks, just a dozen birds, creaked and rattled as they lined up on the cables between the electricity pylons.

A couple of dozen magpies bounced around the water treatment works with a couple of carrion crows. I'd hoped for a wagtail or three but it wasn't my day for it. Sadly, all the hedges around the works are out of bounds after the canalside path fell into the canal years ago. Sewage works hedgerows can be very fruitful with passage migrants and Winter warblers.

A dozen mallards and half a dozen black-headed gulls drifted aimlessly on the canal above the locks. Seventy-odd pigeons and forty-odd black-headed gulls loafed on the lock sides with a couple of herring gulls.

Manchester Ship Canal 
Looking downstream from Irlam Locks towards the railway bridge 

I wandered onto the locks for a look downstream. Three great crested grebes hugged the bank on the Irlam side, mallards and moorhens pottered about on the Flixton side. A few cormorants and another thirty-odd pigeons mooched about on the structures below the lock gates which seem designed for that very purpose.

On the way back I noticed a couple of dabchicks just before they noticed me a dived under a maintenance jetty. A lady had wheeled her baby down the road to look at the ducks and sure as eggs a mute swan came to join them.

A mixed tit flocks was rummaging about in the hedgerows down Irlam Road as I walked back. I got the bus home and arrived to find a collared dove singing from the chimney top. They've not been around this past couple of weeks, it's good to see them back.