Wellacre Country Park

Blackbird

It had been a busy morning and a large part of me was for spending the afternoon lolling about. I decided, instead, to have a potter about Wellacre Country Park while the weather was still cloudy but tolerable.

The blackbirds and wrens sang in the hedge by the school as I walked into Wellacre Wood, a chiffchaff and a blackcap joining in further along. The ring-necked parakeets that seem to be a feature of that corner of the school yard had at least one youngster screeching along with them.

Wellacre Wood 

For the most part the wood was very quiet. Robins, great tits and blackbirds moved silently through the undergrowth. Beyond the wood magpies fossicked about in the fields with horses, woodpigeons grazed the fields without horses and house sparrows bounced about in the hedgerows in between. A whitethroat singing from a hawthorn bush was unusual, it's not often they're on this side of the railway line hereabouts.

Walking to Jack Lane 

Jack Lane Nature Reserve would have been eerily quiet if the magpies hadn't been making a racket and the wrens been taking exception to the magpies. A chiffchaff was the sole songster, it flitted from tree to tree to try and sound like it was a crowd of them. There was neither sight nor sound of any waterbirds, reed warblers or reed buntings. The water levels were low, despite the frequent spots of rain lately. There were plenty of pond skaters, whirligigs and backswimmers in the pools but no sign of any dragons or damsels. There weren't a lot of midges about, though — I wasn't sorry about this having been nibbled by a horse fly earlier. They were probably affected by the rain front that never got round to raining, there was a flock of a dozen or so swifts very high overhead and a noisy family of swallows had flown over from the stables. The sand martins stayed over by Irlam Locks and the water treatment works.

Jack Lane Nature Reserve 

The walk down to Dutton's Pond was almost as quiet, blackbirds, a blackcap and a couple of wrens sporadically joining the couple of chiffchaffs singing on the railway embankment. Blue tits, robins and bullfinches slunk their way through the undergrowth without a sound. A steady traffic of black-headed gulls and lesser black-backs passed leisurely overhead in ones and twos.

A raft of mallards — a couple of ducks, their full-grown ducklings and a handful of eclipse drakes — drifted over Dutton's Pond. A couple of moorhens were a bit more purposeful in trying to pull some waterlilies to bits but not unduly effective.

I decided to skip most of Green Hill, the weather had got a bit oppressive and I could walk through to Flixton Station for the train home and not mess about with buses. Blackcaps, blackbirds, chiffchaffs and a song thrush sang in the trees as I walked through to the river. Long-tailed tits bounced through a clump of dog roses, blue tits and great tits fossicked about in the nettles and hogweeds.

For once there was no birds at all on the Mersey as I walked past, not even any woodpigeons in the riverside trees. Which sort of summed up the afternoon, really.