Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck 

It was a dark, muggy, overcast day. I let the worst of the rain pass and went to take photographs of mandarin ducks in the gloom. There's something about the cheerful abstraction of the patterns on the drake's plumage that's just right for this weather.

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin duck 

Mandarin ducks

Mandarin ducks 

Mandarin ducks 

There were about fifty black-headed gulls on the pool by the car park together with similar numbers of mallards and coots. An adult mute swan was accompanied by two full-grown cygnets with no sign of her mate. Tufted ducks and moorhens jostled through the crowds and a cormorant and a heron loafed at the tip of the peninsula. There were very few Canada geese about, and just the one domestic greylag. The big white Muscovy duck seemed to be on its own, too.

By the car park

Etherow Country Park 

I walked on. There were dozens of mandarin ducks on the canal, most of them sitting amongst the tree roots under the bank, often in the company of mallards.

River Etherow

As I approached the weir I spotted a dipper preening on a rock in the river, a nice bonus for the afternoon.

Dipper

Dipper

Dipper

Dipper

Keg Wood

I had a bit of a wander into Keg Wood, spending most of my time trying to pick out the runners and riders in a large mixed tit flock working its way through the trees by the wayside. I had it down to a couple of dozen long-tailed tits with a couple of great tits, a nuthatch and a handful of blue tits then the flock moved its way up into the canopy of some ash trees which had already mostly lost their leaves and I realised I had substantially underestimated the number of blue tits — there were more than a dozen and at least half a dozen great tits. The flock was silent, unlike the buzzard circling overhead and the carrion crows debating whether or not to give it a hard time. In the end they left it alone and it drifted across over Ernocroft Wood.

Walking through the beechwood

Jackdaws were making a racket of starting to head to roost as I took the high path through the beechwood back to the car park. Perhaps it's not being quite so hard to avoid the word 'quiet' this week as I'd feared.