A suburban stroll at Christmas

Moss Park

It was a bright, sunny and mild Christmas Day though decidedly nippy first thing. The garden was quietly busy and the usual dozen black-headed gulls were back on the school playing field, today with three very noisy herring gulls.

I decided on a late morning walk to take advantage of the weather and get a bit of movement back in the joints. Given the constraints of the day I did one of my lockdown walks: past the station, past the allotments and down to Moss Park and back the long way round. It works out as a mile and a half of suburban stroll. One of the advantages of 1950s town planning is that every half mile or so there's a couple of acres of grass with some trees.

The tail end of a mixed tit flock bounced about the Liverpool-bound platform on the station. The blue tits moved down to the brambles at the other end but the long-tailed tits came over for a minute to scold me before following them on.

There were, as always, plenty of magpies about on the rooftops, mostly in ones and twos, the large groups of unpaired magpies hang about in the parks and school playing fields. At least three nests were being renovated for use. Some of the jackdaws are already inspecting chimney pots, too.

There were three flocks of starlings, none more than a dozen birds, sitting in the treetops and odd birds sitting squeaking and bubbling on television aerials at irregular intervals. The flock at the allotments is pretty much a fixture. The flocks by Moss Park and on the other side of the railway on Barton Road are more fluid and often join together to do the rounds of the school playing fields.

There are also three flocks of pigeons. One haunts the railway bridge over Barton Road, there's one by the shops and then there's the one at the station which sometimes visits my garden. All of them roost under the railway bridge, between fifty and sixty birds as a rule. (Further down the road there's a flock of about a dozen birds resident at the motorway junction and there's another of the same size based on the motorway bridge over Stretford Road.)

The cooler weather over the past week or so has put off the parakeets and they've retreated back to the shelter of the woodland roosts along the Mersey Valley. I don't see this as a bad thing.

The mist rolled onto the school playing fields just before sunset