Irlam Locks

Juvenile heron

After a sadly eventful day (I had to take the cat to the vet's and come home without her) I was in need of distraction. There was a report that a juvenile shag had been spotted on Irlam Locks. Atlantic storms have a habit of bringing seabirds into odd inland localities and Storm Floris probably brought this waif in its wake.

I got the 256 to Town Gate and walked down Irlam Road to the locks. Woodpigeons and collared doves sang on chimney pots and over a hundred starlings gathered on the lines between the electricity pylons along the canalside. A dozen or so swallows hawked over the fields at chimney top height.

A couple of dozen mallards and seventy-odd black-headed gulls loafed on the locks. There were more black-headed gulls with the magpies on the water treatment works. The cormorants loafing at the head of the locks were all cormorants. A great crested grebe and its big humbug drifted in the water with a group of mallards.

Great crested grebes 

Small birds were settling into the hedgerows for the night and were very put out by my walking by. A couple of blue tits and chiffchaffs joined a couple of dozen long-tailed tits that abandoned an elderflower bush and flew over into the hawthorns further down the road. The spadgers and great tits contented themselves with voicing their displeasure and settling under cover. A very grey-looking chiffchaff would have been worth a second look had it not disappeared deep into a nettle bed.

I looked downstream from the lock. A few dozen pigeons were loafing by the lock prior to going to their roost on the lock gates. A juvenile heron was fishing from the bank on the Flixton side. Further down a couple of moorhens made heavy weather of swimming across the canal while mute swans and mallards cruised about. A pair of great crested grebes and their youngsters dozed by the Irlam bank.

I'd walked over to the Irlam side and was making my way back having had no joy finding the shag on the canal. Then I noticed a cormorant sitting on its own at the downstream end of the lock. It looked skinny and brown like a juvenile shag and the beak had an abrupt meeting with the forehead like a stick in a toffee apple. It would have been nice to have a pigeon or gull nearby to provide a bit of scale. I wasn't in my most confident of moods. I was most of the way to convincing myself that of course it was a shag when it stuck its beak  in its back feathers and went to sleep, putting paid to any counter arguments my doubts might have had to offer.

Irlam Locks 

I walked back for the bus, a couple of dozen swifts joining the swallows that had drifted over to hawk over the canal. Google Maps said I'd have a ten minute wait for the 256 at the terminus, the Bee Network said it would be twenty minutes. The bus was waiting at the stop and set off two minutes later, as per the timetable on the shelter. Sometimes you have to go by your gut instinct.