Mosses

Little Woolden Moss 

It was a grey, cool Saturday and I had too many ideas for what to do with it, which nearly always ends up with me spending all day drinking too much tea while making a bog of unraveling my indecision. I dragged myself out for the lunchtime train to Irlam and had a walk over the mosses, which has become the Saturday default setting.

Walking up Astley Road there was plenty of birdlife in the garden hedges, most of it sparrows. This made it all the stranger than most of the hedgerows further along the road were dead quiet. There were handfuls of goldfinches and a few blackbirds by the Jack Russell's gate. A small mixed tit flock mingled with a flock of goldfinches in the trees by the farmhouse just after the motorway. A much larger mixed tit flock, including a couple of dozen long-tailed tits, mingled with another flock of goldfinches by the stables just before Four Lanes End.

The fields between Astley Road and Roscoe Road were busy with woodpigeons, mistle thrushes and starlings but no sign of the covey of partridges I've grown used to seeing here. Robins and blackbirds flitted about the field margins and a female kestrel sat in one of the trees.. As I looked back down Roscoe Road a pale-morph buzzard lumbered off a fencepost and flew off. I've not seen this bird before, a sandy-headed individual with a lot of white on its face. The fallow ground by Prospect Grange held a pheasant and a black and white cat playing tigers which explained why one of the trees in the far corner were full of blackbirds and redwings.

Astley Road 

A lot of magpies and carrion crows littered the turf field just North of the motorway but no sign of wagtails, lapwings or gulls, which is unusual. The turf fields further along were even quieter, a carrion crow or two over on the far side of the field. A bird sat on one of the telephone lines caught my attention and I struggled to identify it because I couldn't get a sense of scale and had nothing to compare it to. I wasn't getting a lot of clues by its being in silhouette. I finally identified it as my first meadow pipit of the year when it flew over, landing close to me in the field so I could get a good look at it then flew back to its wire, which I thought was very sporting of it even if it was camera shy. A couple of great black-backs flew overhead. Oddly the usual passage of herring gulls and lesser black-backs didn't happen.

I walked down Lavender Lane to Little Woolden Moss, scanning the fields either side for signs of birdlife. There were handfuls of carrion crows and magpies and a young kestrel sat on a telegraph pole. A small crowd had built up at the car park, people hoping to see any short-eared owls.

Little Woolden Moss 

It was an hour before sunset but Little Woolden Moss had a twilit feel about it. Carrion crows came in to roost on the far bank and mallards muttered amongst themselves in the pools. I was scanning the scrubby heath by the path when I had a five seconds glimpse of a short-eared owl. Luckily there's not a lot that has that high contrast look of black markings on an oak yellow background, off the top of my head a bittern would be the only other possible match but you'd have to work hard to confuse the two. It disappeared into the heather even fast than it had left it.

Twelve Yards Road 

I walked down Twelve Yards Road and onto Cutnook Lane in the gathering twilight. The last woodpigeons and jackdaws flew to roost. The male kestrel flew in to roost in an old nest. A couple of pairs of mallards quacked in the drowned willows in one corner of a field while a couple of roe deer grazed in the opposite corner. 

New moon and Venus,
Cutnook Lane 

My progress down Cutnook Lane was punctuated by the alarm calls of blackbirds.

It had been a nice, if quiet, walk and the pipit kept the year list ticking on to 114.