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| Fieldfare |
November started with a ferocious wind and teeming rain that calmed down a couple of hours after dawn. The sun came out for an hour or so at lunchtime and I did a tiny bit in a garden that could do with the services of a flock of goats. Had the rain not put me off first thing I would have gone for a wander but as it was I really couldn't be bothered.
Mid-afternoon I got impatient with myself and dragged myself kicking and screaming to the bus stop and got the 256 into Flixton. I didn't fancy squelching my way across Wellacre Country Park so I stayed on to the end and walked down Irlam Road to the locks. As the rain fell and the house sparrows chunnered in the hedgerows I asked myself what on earth I thought I was doing.
And then the rain eased as I got to the bend in the road by the Manchester Ship Canal. The blackbirds and robins came out of the hedgerows to rummage by the verge. The sparrows stayed put and started their noisy ready-to-roost roll calls while starlings bubbled and squeaked as they congregated on the electricity lines.
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| Not today thank you |
When I reach the canal I usually have a look upstream from the old ferry jetty. Not today, it was awash with puddles so I did as best could from the gaps in the bushes further along and found there were only a couple of dozing mallards under the opposite bank.
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| Long-tailed tit |
I'd been surprised yesterday to see just a couple of fieldfares flying over Woolston Eyes, today I was surprised to see a single fieldfare in one of the small trees. Less of a surprise was a mixed tit flock — about a dozen long-tailed tits with handfuls of blue tits and great tits — bouncing through the hedgerow feeding up for the night and paying me not one jot of heed. A wren and a couple of dunnocks mostly kept under cover, pausing every so often to let me know I should be moving on before moving on themselves.
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| Manchester Ship Canal |
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| Irlam Locks |
The wind blew a hole in the clouds and there was the promise of a decent sunset. Black-headed gulls fidgeted between the water treatment works and the locks, a small raft of a dozen of them bathed and loafed in the lock with half a dozen mallards and a couple of pairs of gadwall, a couple of dozen more black-headed gulls loafed on the lockside. A pair of Canada geese were already asleep under the jetty structure on the near bank.
A couple of dozen magpies bounced about in the water treatment works but I could only find the one pied wagtail and there was no sign of the usual grey wagtails either here or on the locks. Weighing up all that black-and-white it occurred to me that I haven't seen oystercatchers here since midsummer.
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| Looking downstream from the main lock |
I walked over the locks to look downstream. Cormorants hung their wings out to dry on the bank. Mallards and moorhens pottered across the calmer waters downstream, black-headed gulls fussed about the churning overflow of the main lock gates. Way downstream a pair of mute swans cruised under the railway bridge and a heron dozed on the far bank.
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| Irlam Locks |
It was a decent sunset. I wandered back, the titmice and spadgers fidgeting into roost, the robins and blackbirds having one last fossick about and the woodpigeons flying in from the mosses to roost over on Fly Ash Hill. It wasn't by any means a spectacular walk but I felt the better for the doing of it.
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| Irlam Locks |
