A day out

There's a plan for a day out I've been nursing for a few years. It keeps coming to mind and i keep finding reasons why it's not the right time for it. I thought it was about time I exorcised this demon so I used one of the free return tickets that have been burning a hole in my pocket to have a day out to Lincoln. I hadn't any birdwatching aims in view, I just haven't been in a lifetime and I thought I ought to.

Of course, this didn't mean I wouldn't be looking out to see what birds were about along the way.

The spadgers were making their first forays into the back garden, the titmice were flitting about the station and the now pretty much resident parakeet made itself known from the telegraph pole down the road.

I wasn't expecting to see much as we crossed the Peak District but I expected wrongly: flocks of carrion crows, rooks and jackdaws rummaged about in the fields and woodpigeons haunted the trackside furniture. A flock of mallards in a field just East of Edale was definitely unexpected.

I had half an hour to wait for the Lincoln train at Sheffield, long enough to note a Westward passage of lesser black-backs and a Southbound passage of fieldfares.

As the train passed through the countryside where Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire nirdle and nudge each other half the fields had sizeable flocks of jackdaws, rooks and/or woodpigeons and every other otherwise empty field had at least one, sometimes as many as six, carrion crows strutting about in it. I was surprised to see so few pheasants this time of year. As we passed near Babworth a skein of pink-footed geese flew alongside the train and very nearly matched it for speed. Goldfinches, chaffinches, starlings, a flock of redwings, were disturbed out of trackside hedgerows by the train, though I wasn't convinced the redwings weren't the more disturbed by a passing buzzard.

The scrap of fenland on the Nottinghamshire side of the Trent has reed buntings and chaffinches flying between its bushes, the pools on the Lincolnshire side had a few coots and tufted ducks as well as some indeterminate dark shapes visible between trees.

Lincoln held the typical urban English assortment of birdlife: flocks of pigeons around the shopping centres; magpies, carrion crows and lesser black-backs flew about and goldfinches twittered in roadside trees. And the usual absence of house sparrows. I spent a few hours being a tourist and enjoying myself accordingly.

Lincoln Cathedral 

The way back through Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire added more of the same, with the addition of a merlin which shot across a field a few minutes after Shireoaks. The train back to Manchester from Sheffield was cancelled so I went home via Leeds in the deepening gloom, picking out the silhouettes of carrion crows, magpies and woodpigeons as far as Wombwell.