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| Little egret, Lostock Park |
If I had my time again I'd be driving all over the shop and let the planet burn. I'd overslept and it was going to be an impossible push to get out for the Liverpool train before ten so I didn't even try. In theory it was perfectly possible to get any number of later trains to go out on the planned excursion, in practice this was Saturday and the service was going to be flaky. In the event the service was non existent after ten o'clock, there just weren't any Northern rail services running the rest of the day. Any suspicion I had of engineering works or some type of unfortunate incident on the line were confounded by all the express trains running by almost punctually, it was just Northern being crap, as per.
I had a plan B which involved waiting for that bus that's always due in nine minutes' time until it disappears and you're waiting for the bus after it. I got fed up of it and went for a walk round my local patch.
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| Wild cherry, Barton Clough |
The park was, unsurprisingly, busy with people and quiet of birds on a relatively warm, sunny Saturday. Thus it was that I was astonished to see a little egret flying low over the trees over the other side and continue on into Urmston. Not a patch tick I'd anticipated.
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| Lostock Park |
Other than that it was another very quiet hour's wander about though the blackbird numbers are starting to pick up again. It's been a particularly quiet year for small birds: the chiffchaffs stuck around but the other warblers gave it up as a bad job mid-August and the flocks of goldfinches have been uniformly small family parties. Robin numbers have been down this year and I saw or heard none today which is a worry. I think an overzealous bout of tidying up at the beginning of the year can't have helped.
- Black-headed gull 1 overhead
- Blackbird 6
- Carrion crow 1
- Chiffchaff 1
- Feral pigeon 1 overhead
- Goldfinch 2
- Great tit 1
- Jackdaw 1
- Little egret 1 overhead
- Long-tailed tit 4
- Magpie 6
- Woodpigeon 11
- Wren 2
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| Barton Clough, the old freight rail line |
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