Wellacre Country Park

Jackdaws and rooks

It was a day largely made up of ten minutes interludes of sunshine in between heavy downpours which made me glad that I'd got so deeply into a book that I missed the train for the planned walk. 

Although the back garden seemed quiet the feathered hooligans accounted for a full feeder of sunflower seeds by mid-afternoon and had also demolished three suet blocks. I only appreciate how many spadgers are dispersed in the garden when Old Silvercheeks shouts them over to the rambling rose and they then decamp to the trackside brambles, a couple of dozen of them sometimes and nearly always with a young blue tit in tow. The mixed tit flock generally assembles some time in mid-Autumn here, in the meantime the adult great tits and blue tits go about in pairs, the young blue tits attach themselves to troupes of sparrows and the young great tits go walkabout. I don't see much of the long-tailed tits this time of year, they'll be fussing about in the trees on the embankment hidden by leaves. I've seen nothing of the coal tits nesting by the station in months though the male down the end of the road is still very vocal.

Its famine or feast over on the school playing field lately. Sometimes it's awash with pigeons, woodpigeons, rooks, jackdaws and magpies. Other days, like today, it's three woodpigeons, a couple of rooks and a magpie. The other day when it was pouring down fifty-odd black-headed gulls and a dozen lesser black-backs danced for worms all afternoon and well into twilight, today four black-headed gulls flew in at lunchtime and hung about for half an hour.

I let the thunderstorm pass by and got the bus into Flixton for a wander round Wellacre Country Park while the weather cleared.

Wellacre Wood 

Wellacre Wood was very, very quiet. Were it not for a singing woodpigeon and the calling of carrion crows in the fields I would have thought I'd gone deaf. More woodpigeons fossicked about in the fields with magpies and crows and swallows hawked low over the grass. A crowd of jackdaws and rooks passed overhead, circled noisily to gain height and headed for the roosts along the Mersey Valley. There were more swallows over Irlam Locks and black-headed gulls fussed about the water treatment works.

Rook

Jack Lane Nature Reserve 

Chiffchaffs squeaked in the trees on Jack Lane Nature Reserve and robins bathed in the puddles in the reedbeds. A couple of sand martins passed over at treetop height then drifted over to the locks. The surprise of the afternoon was a common hawker patrolling the path by the railway embankment, it felt too cool for dragonflies and if there were any about I'd have expected a brown hawker or a Southern hawker, possibly a migrant hawker. Common hawkers are typically moorland dragonflies but the local wet lowland peat bogs and mosses seem okay for them, too.

Walking over to Dutton's Pond 

The mallards, coots and moorhens mooched quietly on Dutton's Pond as the bankside swelled with teatime anglers.

I walked by Green Hill and on to the bus stop on Carrington Road. A mixed tit flock was hinted at in the trees by the rustlings of twigs and occasional calls of blue tits and coal tits.

I called it quits as I had an errand to run and the person I was doing the errands for had decided to get impatient for it. I later had a sunset wander to the station to watch the soprano pipistrelle quartering the field. It's amazing how many people stop for a chat when you're standing by a path with a bat detector in your hand.