Irlam Locks

Sand martin

Having spent much of the weekend catching up with sleep and being intrigued by the Test Match I thought I'd best get some exercise now the heat isn't brutal. There are scores of things you can do whilst listening to the cricket but birdwatching isn't one of them. I got the bus into Flixton and had a look at Irlam Locks to see how the sand martin colony's getting on.

Sand martins

They seem to be getting on okay. At least a dozen nests in the walls of the locks were being visited. A couple of the birds pegged out to dry on the telegraph wires after their baths had a look of being juvenile birds but looking at them from below I couldn't be sure. Young sand martins have paler fringes to their back and rump feathers, giving them a scaly look.

Sand martin

The young swallows flying over the stables were obviously so, with short tails and a general rustiness about their plumage, and would have been so even if they hadn't spent most of their time noisily begging as they chased after their parents.

The unpaired great crested grebes were asleep on the canal with a family of well-grown mallard ducklings. A pair of mute swans cruised upstream. A few black-headed gulls loafed on the lock with mallards, a couple of lesser black-backs and a herring gull. There were a couple of dozen black-headed gulls with the magpies on the filtration pans over on the water treatment works. While I was checking out the martin nests the confusion I was having about the wagtail call I heard was cleared up once I saw the grey wagtail bobbing about on the Irlam side of the main lock and the pied wagtail picking its way through the mallards dozing on the Flixton side.

Manchester Ship Canal downstream from Irlam Locks

Oddly, there was nothing downstream of the locks save the lone cormorant sitting on the end.