Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck
Lots of camera wobble with a 500mm lens at ⅙ second.

It was a dark, gloomy November day but as it was also surprisingly mild and dry I felt I couldn't spend the day with a pot of tea and a pile of Harold Hare comics despite having had two consecutive nights of not managing to get to sleep before five. I'd overslept, which limited my options so I decided to head off over to Etherow Country Park to take photos of mandarin ducks in the gloom. 

Etherow Country Park 

The mandarin ducks decided to make the challenge that more difficult by hardly bothering to get out of bed, lurking in the undergrowth below the canal banks. Taking photos with a long lens at one-sixth of a second is not so much pushing your luck as taking the Michael and it's a miracle not all of them were blurry abstracts. As is often the case the most interesting poor light photos turn out to be the ones where you're not frantically bracketing the exposure to get the most "natural" effect. Poor light and night photography really highlight the difference between the eye and the camera: the eye/brain combination makes a myriad micro adjustments and filling-in assumptions even within a matter of a second and what we see and the way we see it is more like the composition of a painting than the taking of a photo.

Etherow Country Park 

The supporting cast of Canada geese, coots and mallards were a bit thin on the ground and there was just the one mute swan about. Half a dozen tufted ducks drifted across the boating lake.

River Etherow 

The river was very high and with the Weir in full flow and only a couple of rocks projecting out of the water it was no surprise not to find any sign of a dipper.

Keg Wood 

I made brief nods to Ernocroft Wood and Keg Wood where most of the small birds had already given up on the day and the twilight shift of robins and blackbirds started early. Pairs of carrion crows sang their claims for prime nesting sites and a couple kept a watchful eye as a noisy buzzard floated in to roost in Ernocroft Wood.

Canada geese 

The drizzle started as I walked back to the car park and was proper rain as I stood waiting for the 384 to Stockport. Luckily there's a bus every twenty minutes and one was due in three minutes. It was that golden hour after the school run but before the rush hour when schedules are flights of fancy and the online information about bus times are at best a shot in the dark so when one turned up forty minutes later I decided to get off at Marple Station and get the train into Manchester, I'd have a five minutes wait at Marple and a good half hour to  get over to Oxford Road for the train home. Which turned out to be a very bad idea, the train was half an hour late into Piccadilly. So I both missed my train with an hour and a half to wait for the next and stuck at Piccadilly Gardens at the beginning of that hilarious period where you have to wait three quarters of an hour to wait for the two 256s that leave together (I'm really not making that up, I noticed tonight that the 255s were paired up, too, which is bad news as it's a less frequent service). Which is why it took three hours to travel fourteen miles. It's no wonder there's only us two old blokes birdwatching by public transport these days.

Etherow Country Park

Keg Wood 

It was the first properly November day of the month, a misty day full of dismal twilight. Both ideas for today's birdwatching required a degree of fair light so I postponed them and spent the morning catching up with a bit of domestic stuff including refilling the feeders in the back garden for the umpteenth time this week. I'm not sure whether to blame the spadgers or the coal tits which are spending more time stocking up their hoards than actual feeding.

I bobbed over to Etherow Country Park to have a look at the mandarins and for once was out of luck: it was so gloomy an afternoon they'd gone to bed. They roost in the trees somewhere out of sight in the deeper recesses of Keg Wood. There were plenty of mallards and Canada geese and half a dozen tufted ducks were harbingers of Winter to come. The robins were practising looking winsome for the passing trade while dunnocks and blackbirds seemed to be everywhere. Two pairs of carrion crows were setting up territories, cawing furiously at each other across the river. The pair in Ernocroft Wood flew over, cawed performatively atop a beech tree then floated back over before their outraged antagonists could chase them off.

Etherow Country Park 

I lingered in Keg Wood until sunset, hoping for owls or woodcocks or sundry creatures of the night while robins, great tits and wrens objected loudly to my passing by. I'd given up and was most of the way back, picking my way gingerly over wet leaves in the twilight, when I was rewarded by the "whoo-ooo" of a male tawny owl. It echoed across the trees from somewhere near Keg Pool. I didn't bother going back to try and see the bird, my night vision's not what it was and there's no way I'd be tackling that slope in the dark. I could still hear the owl in the distance as I walked through Etherow Country Park and on for the 384 back to Stockport.

Walking back down into Etherow Country Park 

Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck

I was in a dawdly sort of mood so I dragged myself over to Etherow Country Park to have a look at the mandarin ducks. Much to my surprise I couldn't find any, at least not until I got to the weir where a couple were pottering about with the white goose that was there last time I came to visit. There were plenty of mallards and black-headed gulls about, the three Muscovy ducks were back but relatively few coots and moorhens, perhaps because it was a busy Saturday afternoon.

River Etherow 

I had hoped that a dearth of mandarins might be balanced out by an overabundance of dippers on the river but not only weren't there any of them the usual grey wagtails were nowhere to be seen either.The feeders in the garden by the weir had been replenished and was busy with blue tits, great tits and nuthatches.

Keg Wood 

I had a wander round Keg Wood, which turned out to be very quiet. Ernocroft Wood was busier, full of the songs of robins and calls of great tits while a couple of carrion crows bounced around the treetops and a heron flew down towards the river.

The walk back to the bus stop in Compstall was much the same though I noticed another couple of pairs of mandarins at the top of the canal and three new Muscovy ducks near the visitor centre, two all black and one sandy brown (a cross between one of the mullards and a Muscovy?).

An oddly quiet visit here for this time of year.

Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck

I thought I'd best take advantage of the last afternoon before the heatwave so I had a wander over Etherow Country Park to have a look at the mandarins. The drakes are all in full eclipse plumage and there are still a few half-grown ducklings about.

Mandarin duck

The black-headed gulls are back in force now, a sign that we're past the peak of Summer.

River Etherow 

There were a couple of mandarins on the river, too. A scan round eventually found a couple grey wagtails but try as I might I couldn't see any dippers. I suspect they've abandoned this stretch of the river. I had a look at the Weir, just in case. A mandarin was dozing part way up just to keep things interesting.

Great spotted woodpecker

It wasn't too hot so I thought I'd have a walk into Keg Wood. I'd had a brief look at Ernocroft Wood but didn't fancy the steep haul in this weather but the gentler, if more persistent dips and rises of Keg Wood might be manageable. And so it turned out. It was fairly quiet: a few twittering goldfinches, woodpigeons clattering about and chiffchaffs and blackcaps having the occasional bit of song. 

Keg Wood 

I walked up to Sunny Corner and had quarter of an hour's sit down and a drink. It didn't take long for a robin to turn up and start feeding in the undergrowth by the shelter. A family of great tits passed by silently, a couple of blue tits were almost as quiet. A great spotted woodpecker flew close in and gave one of the limbs on an oak tree a good bashing, scattering flakes of wood in the process. I walked back whence I came, I didn't fancy dropping round on the full circuit, the drag uphill from Keg Pool is a task for cooler weather.

Mandarin ducks

The mandarins were out in force sunbathing along the path back to the car park. I've not seen great crested grebes on the big pool this Summer, there was a pair on there this afternoon.

Mandarin ducks

Great crested grebe

Etherow Country Park

Mandarin, Etherow Country Park

I'd had a long lie-in — not because I was still feeling the aches from Thursday's tramping, I'd managed to manoeuvre the cat into letting me have half the bed and I wanted to savour the advantage — so I decided to do a couple of errands then go over to Etherow Country Park mid-afternoon to say hello to the mandarin ducks and see how Keg Wood was for warblers.

It was a bright, windy day and whenever the sun went behind a cloud it felt like the temperature dropped ten degrees. I'd timed my arrival well: the car park was half-empty and the visitor centre cafe was crammed so the paths were fairly quiet.

Unpaired drake mandarins were scattered all about the park, a couple even joining the mallards and geese by the visitor centre. I saw half a dozen pairs throughout the entire visit, mostly flying about the higher reaches of the little canal and a pair on the river. The rest of the females were obviously busy. I know there are a hell of a lot of trees in the woods but I still marvel that there are enough holes big enough for so many mandarin duck nests.

A couple of pairs of mallards had small ducklings. I was struck by how few nesting coots there are this year, possibly because the storms removed a lot of cover and washed out a lot of the large debris that serves as nest platforms.

A couple of chiffchaffs and blackcaps sang down near the visitor centre, another chiffchaff and a willow warbler sang near the weir.

I looked in vain for dippers on the river. The roof has caved in on their old nest site on the weir. The stone roof had cracked and started leaking last year, it's now split in two and knocked the surrounding stones out in the process. They'll have found somewhere a lot less observable. 

Mandarin, Etherow Country Park

I'm trying to do more photos of birds sitting within their landscape, helped quite a bit by so many of them choosing to keep their distance.

Jay, Keg Wood

I had a very brief nosy in Ernocroft Wood where robins, blackbirds and a blackcap sang and carrion crows and woodpigeons clattered about the treetops.

The entrance to Keg Wood was noisy with robins, blackbirds and chiffchaffs. It got quieter further in though there were still plenty of birds about, mostly too busy foraging for hungry mouths to make a lot of noise about it. Nuthatches, goldfinches and jays were kicking about, the jays being unusually conspicuous but silent. This time of year jays are usually invisible screams in the greenery.

Keg Wood

Most of the warblers were chiffchaffs, half a dozen blackcaps battled it out in the hawthorns on the way to the warden's lodge and a willow warbler sang by one of the clearings.

I stopped and had a sit down in the bus shelter effort at Sunny Corner for a drink. A couple of pairs of blue tits and great tits came down to see if I was putting anything out on the bird table and left in disgust when I didn't, not before making sure I felt guilty about my delinquency. I noticed there were more nest boxes about, including a triangular communal one that seemed designed for starlings.

Bluebells, Keg Wood

I walked baclk, enjoying the sight and smell of the bluebells. A few of the riverside trees had fallen where the storms had undermined the banks, opening up a view of the river as it snakes round Keg Pool.

Mandarins, Etherow Country Park

I had another scan of the river by the weir and found a pair of mandarins and a grey wagtail. Hope springs eternal, though, so I kept looking all the way back down to the visitor centre.

River Etherow

Etherow Country Park, Ernocroft Wood on  the right. The river's down the steep bank between the path and the wood.

Etherow Country Park

Mandarin ducks, Etherow Country Park

After yesterday's debacle I thought I'd go over to Etherow Country Park and take photos of mandarin ducks. (Though having reviewed yesterday's records I find I saw fifty-odd species of birds so it wasn't such a debacle as it felt like at the time.)

There were plenty of signs of Spring at home. The coal tits have gone very quiet and only appear for a couple of minutes at a time in the garden. I think they've found an old mouse nest under the railway station platform, I hope I'm wrong because this is a favourite haunt of prowling cats and foxes. The great tits, on the other hand, are being very noisy and the woodpigeons are finishing off the damage to the wooden fence panels caused by the recent storms. Across the road on the school playing field the numbers of gulls have been declining while the woodpigeons are on the increase. Today was the first day without a single gull on there at all. There was a similar pattern as I travelled over to Stockport with just odd stragglers of black-headed gulls and a definite increase in the number of lesser black-backs in the city centre. A second calendar year common gull loafing with a couple of lesser black-backs on a rooftop in Longsight was unexpected.

Over on Etherow Country Park the mandarins were feeling frisky with a lot of billing and cooing accompanied by little whistles and a lot of head bobbing. A few pairs were investigating potential nest sites up in the trees.

Mandarin ducks, Etherow Country Park

Mandarin ducks, Etherow Country Park

Mandarin ducks, Etherow Country Park

Drake mandarin, Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck, Etherow Country Park

Drake mandarin, Etherow Country Park

There was still a few black-headed gulls about, just a couple of dozen and half of them young birds. 

Etherow Country Park

All of a sudden there are singing chiffchaffs. It's still early days yet so there were only a couple in Etherow Country Park and a handful in Keg Wood. They had plenty of competition from robins, wrens and thrushes and even the blue tits were joining in.

Singing blue tit, Etherow Country Park

A few of the coots and moorhens were starting to build nests by the waterside or were busy renovating last year's models with fresh sticks and bits of vegetation. The pair of grey wagtails on the river by the weir looked as if they were weighing up likely sites. Last year they nested near the canal overflow, which scored highly on inaccessibility to four-legged predators but ran the risk of getting flooded out a couple of times. No sign of dippers today, which was a shame.

Ernocroft Wood

I had a brief nosy in Ernocroft Wood. Robins and woodpigeons were most in evidence with pairs of blue tits flitting about the big larch trees.

Keg Wood

Keg Wood was busy with small birds though most were heard rather than seen. Blue tits and goldcrests were easy enough to see as they fed and sang in the branches just above head height. The goldfinches and siskins in the tops of the larches were more of a challenge. The coal tits, great tits and great spotted woodpeckers in the beeches made a lot of noise without giving many chances of seeing them. 

A buzzard circled low overhead before disappearing over the treetops towards Glossop Road.

Keg Wood, just approaching the brow of one of the rises. There's a steep incline just after that straight line going across from the left-hand bank.

I got to Sunny Corner and sat down for a few minutes to have a drink. The aches and pains in my joints as I walked the dips and rises in the path seem to be psychosomatic, literally the moment I reached any level ground they disappeared and they were a lot harder on the way into the wood than on the way back out. This is encouraging, we'll soon be into peak Spring migration and I'll need to put in a few circuits if I hope to see any passing pied flycatchers this year.

The walk back was a bit quieter though a pair of mistle thrushes made a point of making a damned good rattle as I passed by. I had a other look on the river just in case a dipper had come in, but no joy. No matter, it had been a nice couple of hours' walk and I felt a bit happier about the scheme of things than I did yesterday.

Etherow Country Park

Stockport

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme

As my train stopped at Trafford Park Station I noticed a pair of magpies have started building a nest in one of the trees that's already got three magpies' nests in it. They'd got as far as laying a triangular base with three robust sticks and a bit of twiggy filling.

I was set on going out on a wild goose chase when I noticed that the glossy ibis that had been reported in Cheadle Hulme had been seen again this morning. A change of plan was easy enough: when I arrived at Oxford Road I crossed the platform and got the Norwich train into Stockport then five minutes' walk to the bus stop for the 313.

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme, from the bus stop

As the bus approached my stop at The Pointing Dog on Grove Lane I glanced out of the window and got another year tick. Not quite the softest twitch I've ever been on (your average glossy ibis doesn't have the cocky laryness of a hooded crow sitting at a bus stop), but a refreshing change from my recent form.

The ibis was in the middle of a small, damp field and obviously finding rich pickings in the grass. Every so often it would stamp its feet to coax up the earthworms, with a fair degree of success.

I walked down Longsight Lane to try and get a better view and joined a few birders at the end of the hedgerow looking over the low fence. Any concerns I may have had about our spooking the ibis were unfounded, it even decided to come a bit closer where the sun had thawed the ground out the better. A very nice close view of a very nice bird. As I was walking back a chap in a car stopped and asked: "Is it showing well?" "Oh yes," I replied.

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme

Glossy ibis, Cheadle Hulme

It was still only just lunchtime so I decided to bob over to Etherow Country Park for a couple of hours' wander. It was a bright, sunny day so the car park was packed but five minutes' walk lost the crowds. A flock of about sixty black-headed gulls circled high over the car park and seemed to remain there all afternoon.

Etherow Country Park

The mandarin ducks were all a bit camera shy today, I think they were looking for a bit of privacy. No joy finding any dippers or grey wagtails on the river today, possibly because the water was so high.

Ten minutes' nosy round Ernocroft Wood just found a few woodpigeons and blue tits besides the usual carrion crows.

Keg Wood, at the crest of the first dip and rise

I had an hour's wander round Keg Wood. My knee has been painful the past few nights so I thought the walk might get it back into working order or, failing that, give it something more rational to complain about than lying in a nice warm bed. It seemed to work: I negotiated the mad dip and rise by the turn-off to Keg Pool a lot easier on the way back than the way in.

Keg Wood

Keg Wood was fairly quiet, the usual big mixed tit flock near the entrance was busy on the feeders down near the weir. I could hear redwings quietly chacking amongst themselves but it was only when they flew off from the treetops and over towards Ernocroft that I actually saw them. A pair of courting stock doves were easier to spot, they were too busy to bother about being inconspicuous.

The top level path to the visitor centre

A walk back to the visitor centre by the high-level path and just in time for the bus back to Stockport. Not a bad day's birdwatching.