A bit of a wander

Mallards, Brookfield Pond 

The weather for today looked decidedly dodgy so I thought I'd have a bits and pieces sort of a day, getting an old man's explorer ticket and stopping by at places between trains.

For a change I thought I'd head South so I got the train to Buxton with the idea I'd get off at Whaley Bridge and have a nosey at Toddbrook Reservoir which is ten minutes' walk from the station then go down to Buxton and wing it from there.

As I walked up Reservoir Road from the station blackbirds, blackcaps, chiffchaffs and wrens sang in the trees and gardens while swifts and house martins hawked overhead. House sparrows and starlings were visiting nests and a male blackbird was feeding one of its youngsters by a gatepost.

It came as a blow that the reservoir is currently a construction site while they're rebuilding the dam. Still, better safe than sorry. A grey wagtail called as it flew over a construction lorry to give me an idea what I was missing.

Brookfield Pond 

A consolation was the discovery of Brookfield Pond Nature Reserve, which is a fair sized village pond surrounded by trees and very nice, too. A couple of drake mallards mooched about, a moorhen was busy building a nest with unfeasibly large bits of leafy sticks and the songscape was provided by a song thrush and a blackbird. It was too cool for any damselflies or dragonflies to be active, even the pondskaters and midges were a bit lethargic.

The plan was then to get the train to Buxton and have a wander round Pavilion Park. Except that the train was cancelled. I wasn't waiting an hour for the next one so I decided to get the bus. The bus to Macclesfield turned up first so I thought why not? It goes over the moors past the Cat and Fiddle and I could get a train from Macclesfield. So I did.

Google Maps tells you that from Whaley Bridge the 60 goes yomping over the hilltops but in real life it heads for Buxton, veers off just outside the town centre, then onto Macclesfield Main Road and then winds its way through picturesque hill scenery before dropping into Macclesfield. (If you're only ever doing the Buxton to Macclesfield bus journey the once, sit on the right-hand side up to the Cat and Fiddle then, if the bus isn't busy, quietly slip over to the left-hand side, that way you'll get the pick of the views.) 

From Peak View on the bus

There's a bleak beauty to the landscape and the birdwatching can be a bit barren. I thought I'd be making do with a few crows and jackdaws and a skylark, which to be honest isn't a bad haul in this context. Then, near the Peak View Cafe we passed three subadult great black-backs on one of the slopes (before we started to give them prime breeding sites on factory rooves large gulls tended to be moorland breeders the same as many waders, and many still are). Scarcely had that registered than we turned a corner and there was a red kite hovering by the roadside. There is a phenomenal amount of luck involved in birdwatching in any context, it becomes very conspicuous in a setting like this. Thereafter it was the occasional carrion crow and a lapwing until we got near Macclesfield and we started passing rooks and woodpigeons.

Macclesfield is where Plan B came unstuck. We were at the junction across the road from the station and the train to Stoke was due in eight minutes. My thinking was that I'd go to Stoke, have a potter about Manorfields, which is just down from the station, then get the train back into Stockport or Manchester and see how the spirit bade me thereafter. The junction was one of those where you wait three minutes, it lets two cars through then you wait another three minutes. Luckily it's only a minute's walk from the bus stop to the station. Unluckily, I was on the hurry up and I had been sitting on the bus for fifty minutes and the Achilles tendon that's been niggling this past month decided to assert itself quite forcibly. 

I got the train despite it but had to have a rethink. Tomorrow's the only scheduled day of decent weather this week and I've plans for doing something with it, I didn't want to push my luck so I had a lazy afternoon of it, staying on the train to Stoke then coming back to Stockport. I'd prefer to visit Manorfields on a day when it was likely I'd be seeing damselflies and dragonflies as well as catching up with warblers. 

I have to say, while I can be quite disparaging about the lack of birdlife in the fields of Yorkshire, Cheshire wasn't garlanding itself with bounty either today. We got into Staffordshire and it got a bit better, the usual corvids and woodpigeons but in rather better numbers and Etruria was busy with lesser black-backs.

From Stockport I went to Crewe and back just for the ride and to milk a bit of value out of the old man's explorer ticket. The crowd of black-headed gulls, Canada geese and mute swans on the Sandbach flashes reminded me they were due a visit this Summer.

The day didn't go as expected but I'd had a potter about, saw a lot of very agreeable scenery and managed to see a fair number of birds, albeit thinly spread. There's worse things to be doing on a damp Monday.