Ramsgreave and Wilpshire

Along Parsonage Road 

I got some sleep and woke up to a cool and sunny morning. It being a Saturday of course the train I intended getting into town was cancelled. Which worked out in my favour, I wouldn't otherwise have added the two skylarks passing overhead to my garden list as I put bottles out in the bin. The collared dove provided a late dawn chorus, the jackdaws and rooks have been getting frisky of late, Spring is in the air. As I left the house I noticed that it's that time of year when I can't pretend the living room window doesn't need cleaning and I can't pretend I leave well alone so baby spadgers don't fly into it.

A Slavonian grebe had been reported yesterday at Parsonage Reservoir just outside Wilpshire and on a whim I thought I'd go and see if it was still there. I've already got Slavonian grebe on the year list but I don't see them often enough to be blasé about them and I've not seen one anywhere in Lancashire before. Besides, I don't know that part of Lancashire at all well, and much of that awfully out of date. The train cancellation made the connections at Oxford Road and Salford Crescent very tight but I made them safely and got off the Clitheroe train at Ramsgreave and Wilpshire Station just before lunchtime.

By Parsonage Road 

By this time there were reports that the grebe was nowhere to be seen. No matter, it was a very nice day for a walk. Parsonage Reservoir is just short of a mile's walk from the station. It's a dead straight walk down Parsonage Road. Oddly, the traffic was dead quiet in the village but as soon as the pavement ran out the traffic got busier. The jackdaws, pigeons and spadgers of Ramsgreave gave way to the black-headed gulls, starlings and carrion crows of the open fields. A couple of pied wagtails flew over, a noisy flock of a couple of dozen lesser black-backs and herring gulls loafed a couple of fields up.

In my experience there are, very broadly, two types of reservoir as far as birdwatching is concerned: the pit stops and the make yourself comfortables. The make yourself comfortables are usually peppered with coots, mallards and black-headed gulls, there'll be a raft of large gulls and it will have a family of dabchicks if you look hard enough. A lot of Pennine reservoirs are pit stops, there'll generally be some large gulls roosting and/or bathing and perhaps a handful of black-headed gulls or a small flock of Canada geese but most anything else is just stopping by for a quick rest, though they may linger if they find the amenities congenial. The 'anything else' can be almost anything else, or absolutely nothing. I think patch watchers who have a pit stop reservoir on their beat must have nerves of steel. And there's no sure way of looking at a map and predicting whether or not a reservoir is a pit stop.

Parsonage Reservoir 

A single black-headed gull flew around the field by the reservoir as I approached the gate with the "Keep Out: private property and take your dog mess with you" signs. It didn't take a lot of scanning over the reservoir from the roadside to pick it out as a pit stop. It's a smallish reservoir and a dozen large gulls, nearly all lesser black-backs, were bathing midwater. The black-headed gull landed on the bankside. And that was it. I walked down the road, stopping to scan the reservoir with each change of angle but found no more. I wasn't even finding any wagtails or pipits about.

Hollowhead Lane 

I didn't fancy exploring further up what was becoming quite a busy road but I also didn't want to just retrace my steps all the way back so I walked back a little then down Hollowhead Lane past the golf club and into Wilpshire. A male kestrel hunted the fields by the road, carrion crows cat-called golfers from the safety of treetops and robins and great tits bustled about in hedgerows.

I had plenty of time and no particular place to go so I spent the rest of the afternoon bus-hopping, getting to know a bit more of the area and enjoying the scenery along the way. If I ever get old enough to get a pensioner's bus pass (the goal posts move every time I approach them) I'll be doing a lot of that. 

Looking up in passing at one of the slopes on Pendle Hill I wondered how I was idiot enough as a kid to slide down it on a sheet of sacking. No wonder the bones hurt when I get off a bus.