Hindley

Blackcap, Amberswood 

The 132 appeared first at the Trafford Centre bus station so I headed out for Amberswood, getting off on Manchester Road and walking down the shared bikeway. 

Amberswood 

The hedgerows were noisy with singing robins, chiffchaffs, great tits, wrens, dunnocks and blackcaps and the twittering of goldfinches. For once one of the blackcaps was singing out in the open and sat still while I struggled with a fussy background and strong light to get some photos, none of which were much cop. These are the times when I really notice the difference between using a digital SLR and using a bridge camera, with the SLR I could manually tweak the lens smoothly to get the focus exactly where I wanted it, with a bridge camera the camera focus can only be driven mechanically with a series of little jerks. On the plus side, it looks a lot less like I'm pointing a rifle at the birds and it's a third of the weight. Swings and roundabouts.

Amberswood 

It was a bit quieter walking through the woodland, there being less cover. Wrens, blackbirds, coal tits and robins sang while magpies and woodpigeons clattered about in the treetops. A willow warbler sang in a stand of thin birch trees. Furtive movements in hawthorn bushes were as likely to be dunnocks or robins as squirrels.

When I got to the corner of the lake reed buntings (all male) were busy at the feeders with a couple of great tits. I hung around in the hopes a willow tit might make an appearance but no go. A Cetti's warbler sang from the reeds next to the feeding station.

Amberswood Lake 

There were a couple of guys in a boat on the lake so what little bird life there was — the usual pair of mute swans and three great crested grebes, half a dozen mallards, a couple of coots and a handful of black-headed gulls — were at the other end. Unfortunately it turned out we were both going in the same direction. I don't know if it was me or the boat that flushed the water rail out of a patch of thin reeds, I don't often get to see them flying over open water, but it was definitely the boat that made another Cetti's warbler dart out of cover and sing defiance at them from the top of a reed stem.

Low Hall 

I walked across the road to Low Hall where nuthatches and song thrushes joined the songscape.

Shovelers, mallards and lesser black-backs 

The usual pair of mute swans were asleep on the bank of the pond. There was an odd assemblage on the water: a pair of shovelers, two pairs each of gadwalls and mallards, a pair of teal and a pair of lesser black-backs. The noisy pair of dabchicks kept to the reeds.

I wandered round the woodland, hearing more song thrushes and great tits but seeing mostly blue tits and robins. 

Low Hall 

I didn't want to follow the path round back where I started so I turned under the railway bridge and headed down the path that leads to Bickershaw Lane. I wouldn't normally contemplate it as it's as rough as a badger's armpit but the baked hard churned mud was dry, if rugged, walking. The fields by the lane were littered with woodpigeons, jackdaws and carrion crows, the lapwings particularly objecting to the crows.

As I waited for the 609 into Leigh I watched a pair of courting buzzards circling over the field the other side of the hedge and nearly missed noticing the bus turn the corner.