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Juvenile goldfinch 

It was another warm but not oppressive day. The spadgers had hit the sunflower seeds hard first thing then spent a while eating the last of the unripe Pyracantha berries (it's not like there's so little alternative food available they couldn't wait for them to ripen). After a bad night's sleep and a busy morning I got back home and just needed to doze off for a bit. After I woke up I had a bleary-eyed scan around the garden and wondered what the brown shape was at the bottom of one of the seed feeders. I've hardly seen any young goldfinches in the garden this year so it was nice to see a fluffy fledgling as it got the hang of how to pick seeds out of the hole.

I had an evening errand so I took this as an opportunity to take the bat detector for a walk. Dozens of lesser black-backs were flying overhead to roost, the majority of them heading for Salford Quays, a few individuals heading in the opposite direction for Woolston Eyes. 

Robins and woodpigeons were having one last song in Lostock Park. I spotted the noctule bat flying through the poplars before I caught its call on the bat detector.

Lostock Park 

On the way home in the twilight I stopped by the station. Humphrey Park is the rather grand name for the quarter of an acre of mown grass that lends it's name to the station. A couple of people were having one last walk of their dogs for the night (this is not a euphemism). A bat, entirely unconcerned, was hawking over the field at chest height. I struggled to catch its calling on the detector until I accidentally nudged the frequency setting too far down the scale. In the process of resetting it I found that this was a quite deep-voiced noctule bat calling at 19 – 20kHz. In fact, it had a few deeper notes in its repertoire, a couple of times I heard something very like the screaming of a swift, though very much quieter. I think I was more made up that I'd been able to hear a bat than I was at finally finding two in two different places on one local walk.