Wellacre Country Park

Moorhen, Dutton's Pond 

It was a dim and cloudy morning and I had errands to run that kept me busy well into lunchtime. Then it became a very lovely afternoon, tired though I was I wasn't for wasting it so I had a potter round Wellacre Country Park.

Wellacre Wood 

I got the 256 to Town's Head and walked into Wellacre Wood. Robins sang and wrens chaffed in the undergrowth. Nearly all the movement in the trees was squirrels or woodpigeons. A couple of blackbirds were good to see, they've been in short supply lately.

Wellacre Country Park 

I emerged onto the paths between the fields. Goldfinches and blue tits bounced about in the hawthorn bushes, carrion crows and magpies fossicked about in the fields and there was steady traffic overhead with woodpigeons flying in from Irlam and black-headed gulls flying over to the locks. The swallows have been and gone but the absence of starlings came as a surprise. The latest candidate for last dragonfly of the year, a Southern hawker, zipped across the fields to Jack Lane where the usual crowd of house sparrows were making a racket in the hedgerows.

Jack Lane Nature Reserve would have been very quiet indeed were it not for a couple of magpies in the trees and an invisible water rail about six feet away from me in the reeds. It came as a relief to see some water back in the pools. 

A little water back in the pools

Things picked up as I walked down the path by the railway line. Blackbirds, robins and wrens were busy in the pathside verges, chiffchaffs and chaffinches squeaked in the trees and a good-sized mixed tit flock — a large party of long-tailed tits with a few great tits and blue tits — cascaded through the drowned willows at the base of the embankment.

Mallards, Dutton's Pond 

It was a lazy afternoon at Dutton's Pond. The mallards dozed, the moorhens pottered about and the coots were notable by their absence.

I was dead on my feet, a week's lack of sleep and a couple of busy days had caught up with me so I called it quits and got the trains home from Flixton. It's a daft thing that although it's three stops down the line I have to get the train into Manchester then stay on it and get off at Humphrey Park on the way back. It's even dafter when the train driver has the wrong sheet in his cabin and sails past every station up to Urmston and you have to wait for the Manchester train at Urmston to get home.