Salford Quays

Black-headed gull, Salford Quays

It was another of those days with little light but plenty of glare. I'd caught up with my sleep and while still not my usual frisky kitten self I could at least pass as human. I thought I'd have a look at my local patch then go over to Salford Quays to see how the gulls were doing.

Lostock Park 

I had a phenomenally quiet walk through the park — even the magpies and woodpigeons weren't much in evidence. There's a sweet chestnut on the corner that looks great but produces thin, spindly chestnuts. For once I found a plump chestnut big enough to eat, I found a place that could use a sweet chestnut sapling, planted the nut and wished it luck.

Mute swan

I got the 250 to Wharfside and had a wander along the Ship Canal at Salford Quays. Mute swans fed in the shallows by the embankment. Out on the water most of the gulls were lesser black-backs, a few dozen of them, with fewer black-headed gulls and a handful of herring gulls. A couple of cormorants were fishing and the Canada geese that were making all the noise were over in Central Bay.

The subadult lesser black-backs kept picking up stray bits of flotsam and carried them about for a minute of two before dropping them. I'm still not sure if it was a desperate search for food or some sort of play.

Lesser black-back

Herring gulls

Most of the gulls around South Bay and Gnome Island were black-headed gulls, with a few herring gulls and a couple of young lesser black-backs. Coots and moorhens pottered about, magpies and pigeons joined them on the mud and cormorants loafed on the sides. 

Cormorant
It would be easier to see if it held its head straight but the angle of its throat pouch shows it to be a sinensis bird.

South Bay

One of the gulls in a dark corner of Clippers Quay had me scratching my head. It looked okay at first sight for a big second-Winter herring gull, I put the darkness of the grey on its back and wings down to the gloom of the corner and the fact I only had silvery-white black-headed gulls to compare it with. The wings didn't seem right, though, they were a bit long for a herring gull and there was a lot more grey than brown feathering. The head wasn't right, either, the streaking was very light with just a bit of eye shadow. A couple of second-Winter herring gulls joined the crowd and immediately confirmed I was right to wonder. So it must be a second-Winter lesser black-back then. A particularly chunky lesser black-back. With a pale head. And mantle and wings a couple of shades too pale for a lesser black-back. I don't have an instinctive eye for yellow-legged gulls, I always end up realising what I'm looking at by a process of elimination when one of the crowd looks more than normally different. In my defence, this one didn't look to have completed its wing moult so there was a bit more brown than I might have expected.

Mute swan

The walk down to Pomona was accompanied by black-headed gulls, mute swans and moorhens on the water and robins and wrens in the vegetation on the embankment. A grey wagtail saw me before I saw it and it flew into the cover of an overhang.

You can't walk down to Cornbrook any more and I didn't fancy walking down the Bridgewater Canal into Manchester so I walked over to White City for the bus home. I'd had my bit of exercise and an early bit of Winter gull bafflement.